[Box Backup] Possible date bug?

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Timothy,

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008, Timothy Wilson wrote:

> Thanks for your reply! Is there any reason why directories don't have a 
> timestamp? Is there a technical reason? A planned feature? Or just a 
> case of "it's not quite done yet" :) I don't want to push you!
>
> I would like to know when my most recent backup was, and generally I 
> just look at the timestamps of the directories. But obviously I need to 
> find another way with boxbackup.

This is what Ben said about the problem when I asked him:

>> Ben, why is it that we zero the modification time on directories? Just
>> because we don't diff/patch them?
> 
> mtime on a directory is not useful, and would result in lots of updates 
> to metadata in the parent directory on the store.

If we wanted to store directory timestamps, we could probably work around 
the problem of metadata updates on the parent by attaching new attributes 
to the directory itself. It might be useful to do this whenever a 
directory's contents on the store are updated, to indicate the recentness 
of a directory, which I think is what you're asking for. But nobody has 
proposed implementing this yet.

Cheers, Chris.
-- 
_____ __     _
\  __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <0000 at qwirx.com> - Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Ruby/Perl/SQL Developer |
\__/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU : free your mind & your software |