This may be a dumb question. I would like to use duplicity to make backups to Amazon S3 of directories, each of which contains a different user's data. Each directory could be written to at any time. So I have two questions:
Should I be concerned that a scheduled backup of a directory might occur in the middle of data being written to files in the directory, resulting in a corrupted backup?
And if that is a valid concern, how would I go about temporarily delaying an operation while IO was happening, to try to minimize that effect.
Thanks for the advice
To provide part of the answer to my question, it looks like I can use
lsof +D /directory/treeto see whether any processes have any files in a directory open.