[Box Backup] Possible date bug?

[Timothy Wilson]

Hello Chris,

I appreciate you taking the time to ask Ben. Out of curiosity, what is
the best way to determine how recent a backup is? I mean, even if it's
something like just ls -l on the backup directory in the shell, as
long as it give me an idea.

Or is it just better to view the logs, to see what's failing (if
anything). The reason I'm concerned is that I use boxbackup with
remote sites, and the internet lines here in Australia varies from
almost reliable to pathetic, so my current system of rsyncing
directories with a cronjob often fails silently.

I feel 98% confident that every machine I have on box (currently about
6, with more to come) can recover fully from a disaster, so this is a
huge improvement from my current system. But that last 2% would be to
know exactly when a backup occurred (or didn't).

But if it's all in the logs, I'll go about reading them each morning :)

All the best,
Timothy.


On 23/02/2008, Chris Wilson <chris@qwirx.com> wrote:
> 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 |
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