[Box Backup] Removing backup locations from the store

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Pete,

On Wed, 12 Mar 2008, Peter Jalajas, GigaLock Backup Services wrote:

> 1) Does waiting 48 hours actually physically delete the files from the 
> server, or does it just mark them as deleted?  I thought files marked as 
> deleted just stay there until needed to make room under the soft limit.

It marks them as deleted, which is all that it can do, yes. The server 
will actually delete them when it needs to make more room for new files. 
It shouldn't make any difference except that you have the possibility to 
undelete them if you change your mind.

> 2) How _are_ the files deleted on the server anyway?  Is it a simple rm, 
> or is it a shred?  (Since we don't trust the server, maybe it doesn't 
> matter...)

Just a simple unlink, and no it doesn't matter as they are encrypted and 
unreadable by the server anyway.

> 3) Have you ever thought about making a java gui?  I played around with 
> the eclipse and netbeans IDEs a few weeks back, and they look like they 
> have a lot of potential, especially netbeans as I recall.

I did think about it when I started the project, and decided against it 
for three reasons:

* Java does not have enough access to underlying filesystem properties 
such as extended attributes, without native extensions, which makes it 
unportable again and makes the build process difficult.

* Java GUIs are dead slow. Yes, even with SWT. I wanted a small, fast 
application.

* The existing code to interface with the server is all written in C++, I 
didn't want to rewrite it all or to create native wrappers for it, as this 
would again lead to unportability and make the build process difficult.

I still wanted a cross-platform portable GUI so I decided to learn wx and 
use that instead. I'm still pretty glad that I did. There would be no 
(even partially) working Boxi by now if I hadn't.

Cheers, Chris.
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