[Box Backup] Is it possible to 'undelete' files in the Box Backup store?

[Ben Summers]

On 18 Jan 2006, at 18:17, Stuart Hickinbottom wrote:

> I've had Box Backup working well for me for a while now, and I'm  
> very impressed with it, thanks. Its requirements exactly fit my  
> needs (remote, automatic, and encrypted), and it's been stable and  
> pretty trouble-free once it was all set up.
>
> A hardware failure this week, however, led to my Linux server  
> unmounting a large external disk (mounted under /mnt/media), which  
> had the effect of causing all the files and directories under that  
> mount point to effectively disappear.
>
> boxbackup duly noticed this and marked all the files and  
> directories under that mount point as deleted (~150GB). This is a  
> little inconvenient as they've not really been deleted at all, they  
> were just temporarily invisible to the client daemon.

You know, I got caught by something very similar to this myself. I  
then proposed a feature on this list which would solve this problem,  
but got so badly flamed over the idea of noticing empty directories,  
logging a warning, and waiting a day before deleting everything, I  
sort of lost interest in the idea.

>
> I've since managed to recover my disk (thank heavens for ext3), but  
> before I re-enable bbackupd on this machine I was wondering whether  
> it would be possible to remove the 'deleted' flag on selected files  
> and directories within the backup store? I know the object IDs of  
> all the objects involved.

http://lists.warhead.org.uk/pipermail/boxbackup/2005-March/001204.html

I want to make this easier in v0.11, basically by being able to roll  
back to any particular time. I have designed it, just need to write it.

>
> If I just restart bbackupd now it will, I think, begin uploading  
> all 150GB of those files that it will think have just been created  
> (maybe it's cleverer than that, but I don't expect it'll notice  
> that those files/directories already exist in 'deleted' versions).

No, it won't be that clever.

> Uploading this quantity of data will work, but will be slow as my  
> backup server lives on the other end of a 256Mbit DSL link.
>
> Any ideas before I restart bbackupd and watch the modem flash for a  
> couple of months?

Read list archives. :-)

Ben