[Box Backup] Mailbox backup is dangerous.

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Edo,

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, scartomail wrote:

> @Chris(or other developpers): Would you please give you opinion on this?

I'm not sure that it is a "bug". Box Backup was originally designed to 
work this way. The procedure for removing old and deleted versions is 
undocumented and I don't claim to understand it. A bug by my definition is 
when software's behaviour does not match its documentation, or it fails to 
perform a documented function.

I agree that the behaviour is undesirable. I have been intending for a 
long time to implement backup snapshots where every file within a snapshot 
is preserved, and the client, not the server, chooses when to delete an 
entire snapshot to free up space on the store.

Some members have written patches to change the housekeeping deletion 
behaviour. However as I don't understand it, I don't feel qualified to 
review those patches, and I feel that the current housekeeping behaviour 
is fundamentally undesirable, and patching it will not help. The only 
thing that would make me (personally) comfortable that my old versions of 
files were being preserved to my liking is the above immutable snapshot 
behaviour.

> If there are bugs in BB and it isn't stable yet, that's ok, it is still 
> under development. But a lot of people report all kinds of bugs and 
> errors with BB.

Most of the bugs reported are not data loss bugs, e.g. failure to compile, 
bbackupd crashes, or new feature requests.

I try to investigate data loss bugs as best I can, if I don't understand 
why they occur or if there's a chance of retrieving the lost data. 
Unfortunately in Tom's case I have already failed on many attempts to 
understand the housekeeping deletion logic, and there is no chance of 
recovery of the lost data.

I also haven't had a lot of time to attend to Box over the last two years. 
When I joined the project, I originally intended just to write Boxi. Since 
then I have stepped up to maintaining the windows port, and then to 
maintaining the whole of Box Backup.

> Shouldn't we test and address(report) them(or are they already reported)?

Yes, definitely, please do report them, test them, and hold us to account 
to make sure that we publish correct, informative and not misleading 
information about the capabilities and omissions or risks of Box Backup on 
our website and other appropriate places.

Cheers, Chris.
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