[Box Backup] interactive bbackupquery

[Ben Summers]

On 5 Feb 2004, at 22:51, Juan Vera wrote:

> 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.

I will put in ls and help, though.

>
>>> 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?

Absolutely right.

There is no point in backing up the encryption keys with Box Backup, 
because you can only restore if you have a copy of the keys.

In addition, it would be bad cryptographic practice to store in an 
encrypted form a key, encrypted by itself. It would give an attacker 
too much of a chance to recover the key.

>
>>
>> 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?

Not with that setup.

>  or the problem would
> be if I have another directory mounted on /var/log?

Yes, you should not backup /var if you have something 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 :)

It's a slightly different way of doing backups than other systems. 
Better for the situations I designed it for, but not others. So I'll be 
adding the ability to behave in a traditional manner too.

I trust that you're doing a "verify" occasionally, and it checks out OK?

Ben