[Box Backup] interactive bbackupquery

Juan Vera boxbackup@fluffy.co.uk
Thu, 05 Feb 2004 19:51:20 -0300


Ben Summers wrote:

>> What I didn't like was the unfriendly interactive
>> bbackupquery:
>
>
> I am going to do a lot of work to improve this, and give better 
> alternatives to using bbackupquery, which really is a sysadmin tool.


no, I'm sorry. I was trying to be ironic, I just missed the
help/usage banner and the 'ls' command, other than that,
the whole operation with bbackupquery was pretty simple
and friendly.

>> New questions: Why It is not recommended that
>> you backup the {etc,root} directory of your disc?
>
>
> I want to avoid backing up the keys -- just to be very careful about 
> things.

understandable, but, if I did the offsite copy of the
keys, in the worst case I just would have to restore (download)
the whole backup again, right?

>
> And the root directory is likely to contain many mounted filesystems, 
> and having a mount point within a backup location is a Bad Thing 
> because it ruins file and directory tracking (to handle renames 
> efficiently).


I'm not sure I understand this. Suppose I have this mount points:

/dev/wd0a on / type ffs (local, softdep)
/dev/wd0d on /tmp type ffs (local, softdep)
/dev/wd0e on /usr type ffs (local, softdep)
/dev/wd0f on /var type ffs (local, softdep)

is it wrong to backup /root and /var? or the problem would
be if I have another directory mounted on /var/log?

>> I want? Tried with kill -1 but it ignored some
>> files, I think because of the BackupInterval and/or
>> MaxUploadWait.
>
> How can I force bbackupd to upload changes whenever
>
> Yes, I'm afraid you can't do this at the moment, but I'm planning to 
> change things so that you can issue a command, and it will bring 
> everything absolutely up to date.

ok, no big deal, I just went to sleep and everything is in
place right now :)

>
>>
>> Are you considering to implement server to client
>> connections?
>
>
> Yes.
>
>>  In case you are -and I hope you do-
>> maybe it would be even better to be able to handle both
>> ways in the same server simultaneaously: some machines
>> connecting to the server and the server connecting to
>> some other. While I don't have that need, I think it
>> gives some more flexibility to the software.
>
>
> If you're going to do something, you might as well do it properly. So 
> yes, it'll do both -- it's really not that much more work.
>
super!

> I can't promise when it'll be done, of course.

:)

Thanks