[Box Backup] interactive bbackupquery

[Ben Summers]

On 10 Feb 2004, at 06:50, Pascal Lalonde wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 06, 2004 at 10:15:13AM +0000, Ben Summers wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> 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 .
>
> Maybe you should make the client not cross filesystems, like 'du -x'
> does, or 'dump'. Of course, this would be clearly indicated in the
> documentation, and users will expect this behavior. But having bbackupd
> give warnings each time could become annoying. Is that what you were
> planning?

I was planning to just refuse to run with error messages on stdout and 
in the log.

Of course, I should do more sophisticated rename tracking, but I don't 
think the effort and the decrease in performance will be justified. I 
prefer simple code, because there's less to go wrong.

>
> So far so good. 'compare -a' shows that everything is in order. I
> finally found a machine to use as a more permanent backup server. I'm
> just waiting to get a bigger hard drive and a little UPS. Soon we
> will start using it (me and some friends) for backupping our personnal
> stuff. This way I'll be able to see how it goes with a bigger volume
> (+/- 40gigs), with 5 different users, and a few linux clients also.

That's great news! Thanks.

>
> Would the client run in Cygwin?

I don't see any reason why it should be difficult to do a quick Cygwin 
port.

The now-free MS UNIX emulation layer might be interesting as well:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/default.asp

>  And would it handle spaces in file and
> directory names?

Absolutely! I'm testing it on a server which backs up files served 
using Samba, and all the Windows filenames are handled without 
problems.

>  I talked to some friends, and they would really like to
> see this working on Win32, so maybe Cygwin could fill the gap while the
> native Win32 client comes out. I'll give it a try if I have the time...
> Of course the permission would be "cygwinized", but in many cases 
> people
> don't even have backups, so it's better than nothing.

Windows doesn't actually encourage permissions to be used, so it may 
not be terribly useful to do anything with them anyway -- when 
restored, the permissions would have the wrong user IDs unless you used 
some other backup software to back up the system configuration.

>
> How is the "exclude" snapshot? Stable enough to make a 0.04 ? :-)

Seems fine to me, however, I want to do a little more with it before 
doing a 0.04. I've just been a bit busy with other stuff recently, so 
haven't had much time to do any work on this. Things should be cleared 
up in the next few days though.

Ben