RaspberryPi & !Boot.Loader

I have noticed that after booting and in the desktop, the file !Boot.Loader is Open for R/W.

Has anyone else noticed this, or know of any cause?
Closing it does not seem to cause problems, though it may get re-opened at some point.

This causes an error when I run a Copy !Boot. for a simple backup.
Using a recent RO5.29 – will try older versions when I get chance.

As far as I’ve noticed, it’s always been that way (like, back to 5.23 and probably earlier).

Are you sure you want to copy that file? Because of its specialness, there’s no sensible way of restoring it from a backup.

Are you sure you want to copy that file? Because of its specialness, there’s no sensible way of restoring it from a backup.

Copying the whole “Loader” file is surely the easiest way to backup its whole content? That you cannot restore the file itself (easily) is not the biggest problem when restoring e.g. a Pi.

Anyway, I think I remember that this is typical DOSFS (and many other imagefses) behaviour, an auto-close of the image file needs to be implemented by hand (I think David Pilling did that for SparkFS). Closing the file “by hand” is dangerous because – again IIRC – the ImageFilingSysem is free to do delayed-write-back caching if it likes.

Are you sure you want to copy that file?

Yes – (a) it is a DOSdisc, so can be read … though restoring files would need a Pi-formatted SD card.
(b) It is not simple to exclude it when using *Copy

It was something I had not noticed before, and it seems unneccesary to me.
But as it seems expected, I will now try to find a way to close it safely before the *Copy.