[Box Backup] Snapshot restores

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Jonathan,

On Wed, 6 Aug 2008, Jonathan Yoder wrote:

> Of all the backup systems I've evaluated (and tried) so far (Bacula, 
> BackupPC, rdiff-backup, Amanda, rsync, BoxBackup), I've been most 
> impressed with BoxBackup.  Encrypted storage, userland RAID, and storing 
> only the diffs on incremental backups are all important to us.  I'm 
> currently using rsync with some scripts I developed.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't find a way to restore an old 
> snapshot completely (yet) without manually finding each file and typing 
> in the number. This feature, if it's added, would be the icing on the 
> cake that would persuade us to abandon our complicated rsync scripts.  
> Is this in the plans for BoxBackup?  I would love to help test, even if 
> I need to check out from SVN and compile...

Unfortunately it's not completely possible at the moment as we don't 
record the deletion date of files or the dates of attribute changes, so 
it's not clear whether we should include a given file or set of attributes 
in the restored directory or not. Also it's not clear whether files 
might be missing because sufficiently old versions no longer exist 
(have been removed by housekeeping).

Boxi supports restoring to a particular date by restoring the most recent 
version of a file before the set date. If no older version exists, no file 
is restored. The attributes restored are always the most recent ones 
available.

I'm afraid the bbackupquery command does not have a restore-to-time 
feature at the moment, although you could script it.

We plan to add full snapshot tracking, which would solve these problems, 
in the next version, 0.12.

Cheers, Chris.
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