[Box Backup] Restoring old directory tree?

Chris Wilson boxbackup@fluffy.co.uk
Tue, 8 Apr 2008 21:06:17 +0100 (BST)


Hi Imran,

On Tue, 8 Apr 2008, Imran Niazi wrote:

> I remember talking about similiar or same issue, where you want the 
> state of a system at a certain point in time.  I'm not sure what came of 
> that, or if its planned.

I'm afraid the necessary support to do it properly has not yet been 
written as code. It may happen soon, I'm planning a journalling feature 
for backups onto S3 and for greater disk efficiency, and one side effect 
would be a snapshot of all files that existed at a particular point in 
time.

> One way to implement this is, each record should have two dates 
> associated to it, a 'start' date and a 'end' date.  start date is when 
> box backup saw the file in its current state.  end date would be when 
> the file disappeared or changed.  In a case of a file deletion that 
> would be it.  But if a file changed, you have a new file record of the 
> same name (i guess thats how its done now), and you would then have a 
> start & end date.  Start date would be the same as the end date of the 
> previous revision of that file etc.
> 
> I guess this is obvious and you might have already been implemented in a 
> newer version.

I don't think it even needs to be so complex. The "start date" for a file 
is the oldest revision of it that we have. All we'd need to implement this 
feature is the deletion date.

Cheers, Chris.
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