[Box Backup] interactive bbackupquery

[Pascal Lalonde]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2004 at 05:31:08PM +0000, Ben Summers wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
Maybe my question wasn't too clear. What I mean is: I don't mind if
bbackupd does not cross mount points. What I would like is a way to stop
it from complaining (a command-line flag maybe?). This way, when it
encounters a mount point, it silently skips over it, and continues with
the next file/directory. This is just to spare us from specifying every
mount point as exclude patterns, thus keeping the config file cleaner by
not having very long exclude patterns specifications. It is common that
I see a lot of stuff mounted under /var, like /var/www, /var/mail,
/var/log, /var/postgresql, /var/tmp, etc. I have no idea of the
complexity of doing this, though, so maybe that's what you mean when
you say you want to keep the code clean.

Pascal Lalonde