[Box Backup] New encryption format & Space usage

[Ben Summers]

On 29 Apr 2004, at 15:30, rprice@freeshell.org wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Ben Summers wrote:
>
>>> One thing thats annoying me lately (and it's not your fault of
>>> course), is
>>> trying to find out what exactly I'm backing up when the daemon runs. 
>>> I
>>> tried the option in the config file that should tell you what's going
>>> on,
>>> but what I was really hoping for was a list of files (and their 
>>> sizes)
>>> that were being backed up.
>>
>> Extended logging will give you some hints.
>
> How do I turn that on?

vi /etc/box/bbackupd.conf

Uncomment the ExtendedLogging line...

>
>>
>>>
>>> The problem behind this, is that I see some pretty huge numbers for
>>> amount
>>> of data backed up sometimes (and even for uploaded), and I feel that 
>>> my
>>> machine should have been *quiescent* before the large amount of data
>>> was
>>> backed up.
>>
>> In the default configs, changes are uploaded 6 hours ahead. So it 
>> would
>> have to be quiescent for over 6 hours for the upload to make no
>> changes.
>
> Yea, this was pretty frequent though, I just can't believe as much data
> changed on the disk as it was seemingly uploading/patching. As I said, 
> I
> think I found the culprit in my wife's work email account which gets
> spammed pretty heavily. I'm not doubting what your program is saying, 
> but
> I'm rather curious as to what is going on that's changing all that 
> data.

It would be nice to know.


[snip]
>> I'm designing taking ADSL a minimum requirement for this system. 
>> That's
>> not to say it couldn't be used with dial-up, it's just it's not
>> designed for it.
>
> So far it seems to work admirably with dialup just so you know...

It's just a matter of bandwidth really. And auto-dial. :-)


On 29 Apr 2004, at 15:16, rprice@freeshell.org wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I actually get some of that info from my log files (I use logcheck so 
> it
> emails me the output from the daemon).
>
> Some of what you want is syslogged.
>
> I was thinking though, that maybe it would be nice to have some sort of
> plugin facility so that others could write plugins so create that sort 
> of
> report.
>
> The idea being that the plugin would be called on start of backup, for
> every file (with file stats, delta stats) and when the backup was
> finished.
>
> That way we could syslog or database-log however much data we wanted to
> keep. Ben wouldn't have to do all the work, and we'd all have more
> flexibility.
>
Hmmm.

So add a config line:

   PipeActionsToProcess = /path/to/utility

When it starts to sync, it runs this utility. When it does something 
interesting, it writes a line to stdin which describes what it did.

Maybe not a bad idea, and probably wouldn't take too long to implement.

Ben