[Box Backup] Boxbackup suggestions

Ben Summers boxbackup@fluffy.co.uk
Fri, 30 Jan 2004 18:42:11 +0000


On 29 Jan 2004, at 22:22, Eduardo Alvarenga wrote:

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> On Thu, 29 Jan 2004, Ben Summers wrote:
>
> <snip>
>> I'm not sure if you mean that?
>
>  As you can see, my english sucks.
>  My native language is brazilian portuguese, so please forgive me.
>
>  s/approach/choice/
>
>  Better?

Sorry, I think completely misunderstood your meaning. A cultural 
thing...

>
> <snip>
>>>  When the code is small, everything makes sense. Without
>>>  documentation, you might get lost one day and be forced to remember
>>>  everything you took a long time to develop.
>>
>> Hence the contents of the notes directory, and the vast quantities of
>> comments in the source files. With the debug version, it is really
>> easy to see what has happened when you get an error. The code is not
>> small already.
>>
>> I would very much welcome comments on the code quality, and the
>> sustainability of documentation and code.
>
>  I was not judging the code itself. But the software documentation, the
>  userland stuff.

Pity, I was hoping I'd get some comments on the code at some time!

But yes, the stuff the user sees is inadequate at the moment.

>
>>>  How about ftp's mget feature? Any possibility to include this?
>>>  Or to make things better, implement recursive fetches from
>>>  files/directories directly via 'get':
>>>
>>>  --
>>>  get -r remotedir/ localdir/
>>>  get rc.* localdir/
>>>  get -r foo/bar/* localdir/foo/bar/
>>>  --
>>
>> Implemented using the 'restore' command, and it's even restartable
>> should your transfer get interrupted.
>
>  I'm now getting used to read your 'documentation.txt' files. Sorry.
>  But something like "restore rc.* localdir/" already works?

No wildcards. Everything or nothing.

>
>>>  My idea is to make boxbackup a REAL recovery system and not just a
>>>  storage where the user might browse thru all their files, like he 
>>> does
>>>  every day on his machine, and fetch any file or directory (even
>>>  recursively) like he was connected to a mirrored ftp server.
>>
>> I'm not sure I quite follow.
>
>  Then, show us your proposal.

bbackupquery is for looking at what's happening in the store for 
troubleshooting, automated backup verification, and perhaps for system 
recovery.

For retrieving bits and pieces, I plan to integrate into the platform's 
file browsing UI, and allow different date based views, and a way of 
seeing all versions of a particular file.

Long term plan, though. I'd like to hear better ideas.

Ben