[Box Backup] Box Backup 0.11rc2 on OS X 10.5

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Achim,

On Tue, 17 Mar 2009, Achim wrote:

>> What would you say are the advantages of Box over Cumulus, i.e. why
>> shouldn't I give up on Box and start using Cumulus instead?
>
> You mean apart from massive user base and great community, code maturity,
> great developer response time, multi-platform support, and (as of today)
> several GUIs to choose from?

Well, I'm glad that you consider all of those advantages :) it's also 
possible that Cumulus will develop some of them too. I kind of wish that 
the Cumulus people had worked with us to improve Box rather than going off 
and doing their own thing, but I guess it was an academic project so they 
had to do original work.

>> (re: directory timestamps and hard links)
>>
>> I think it's technically possible, but not trivial. Files can have new 
>> attributes applied, including timestamps, without re-uploading them, 
>> but I don't think directories can at the moment.
>>
>> Do you actually use either of these? I.e. do you actually care if 
>> they're backed up or not?
>
> I do not rely on these features for personal use at the moment, but I am 
> a bit hesitant to roll out Box Backup in a larger scale with the current 
> situation. Some clients have 100+ GB of application data, and I simply 
> do not know if there is perhaps one program that requires correct folder 
> date stamps. I am also a bit surprised that nobody else seems to have 
> that perception: is it because it is not a real concern or because 
> nobody needs that feature?

So far nobody has come to us and said that they need those features. A few 
people have asked about directory timestamps, but I think it's more 
because they were surprised that the directory listing in bbackupquery 
show 1970-01-01 rather than an actual time for directories.

OS semantics for directory timestamps on Unix are a bit weird. They change 
themselves when some properties of files in the directory are changed, but 
don't reflect the latest date of any file in the directory. I can't think 
of a program that uses them. The only application that I can think of that 
uses hardlines is Dirvish, another backup application.

Cheers, Chris.
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