[Box Backup] Mailbox backup is dangerous.

Christian Tschabuschnig boxbackup@boxbackup.org
Thu, 27 Aug 2009 18:00:53 +0200


Achim wrote:
> 2. The week after, the user unknowingly overwrites some of the holiday
> photos from step 1. without noticing: the digital camera re-uses the same
> filenames for different photos from a visit to the zoo!

Your special scenario would be even problematic if bb _would_ work as
expected since your files wouldn't be recognized as being deleted but as
being changed (*), so the "old version" will disappear somewhen.
Although, as Tom already mentioned, this will (with or without this bug)
only happen when you reach the softlimit and the housekeeping process
runs. As long as you're far away from that limit and you have enough
space you shouldn't have to worry. That's how I understood it.

So your problem is independent of this bug. What we worry about is the
following: Housekeeping tries to throw away the oldest stuff first. If
it has about 100 revisions of 1 spreadsheet it removes the older one
first. But if you delete a file which has not changed for ages that file
is "old" for boxbackup anyway and it will be among the very first files
that housekeeping will delete.

What I (or we, i suspect) want is that bb treats a file deleted on March
1st the same way as a revision of a file which was changed last on March
1st. So it stays as long in the storage until there is so much history
to keep from 2nd March onwards that there is just no space for older stuff.

Regards,
Christian

-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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