[Box Backup] Overall goal for BoxBackup

[Joe Krahn]

Ben Summers wrote:
> 
> On 22 Dec 2004, at 04:42, Justin H Haynes wrote:
> 
>> My opinion is that the platforms to which boxbackup is being ported 
>> represent way too many requirements for restoration.  Backing up a 
>> complete system on mac/windows/everyUNIX, may be easy to support, but 
>> what would restoration look like?
> 
> 
> This is exactly the problem. Box Backup is not just for one platform, it 
> is portable. It is not realistic to make a complete system recovery 
> system for all these platforms. Effort will be diluted, and it won't be 
> terribly good. Certainly not as good as the systems which are already 
> out there.
> 

I just wasn't thinking that a full system backup is all that hard. For 
example, "tar cvzf System.tgz /root_filesystem" run from outside the OS 
gives a complete system snapshot, and doing if from a running OS is 
almost as good for UNIX/POSIX/BSD systems.

BUT, I suppose that you really only need to save system config files, 
mostly in /etc, and non-packaged files in /usr/local. Re-installing the 
rest is fairly fast in the UNIX world. The real nightmare of OS and 
multiple application installations is in Windows, where a 'proper' 
system backup is also the most difficult.

So, I'll concede to the idea that full system backups are either too 
hard or not very important, depending on your OS. Maybe a more efficient 
approach would just be to have a few simple OS-specific utilities (or 
even just good examples) to set up Box Backup to be sure that you are 
including all of your non-package files that take time to edit/install.

Joe