[flexbackup-help] What a shame flexbackup is *almost* there - but I have to reject it

[Peter Valdemar Mørch]

I'm searching for a linux backup solution. And flexbackup is almost it!
There are three things that make me continue looking for other solutions:

1) Crashev has asked these questions (twice):
 My question is - how to restore fully latest backup ? I mean if my
 system fails today and I want to have the freshest backup restored -
 how to do it with flexbackup? Should I extract fullbackup with *.0.*
 and then overwrite files with other days backups or how does it work?
  The other thing is how to to tell apart differential from
 incremental in such scenerio?

These are *very* reasonable questions to be asking of my backup system.
How do I reliably recreate the last good state? Any backup system that
can't answer these questions are not up to the job, IMHO.

2) Pablo Godel asked: incremental backups and deleted files

Basically, if I delete files and make incremental backups, the deletion
of these files is not recorded in the incremental backups. So no, it is
in fact impossible to reliably get to the last good state.

Also, FAQ How do I find out which archive(s) contain a certain file?
on http://www.edwinh.org/flexbackup/faq.html mentions:

 If you don't know in which archive to find a certain file, look at
 the log files. As long as you have verbose turned on (default), you
 can just 'zgrep filename /var/log/flexbackup/*.gz', and that works
 pretty well.

No, that doesn't work very well. It *sucks*! (Especially if you have to 
  restore 12342345 files and you don't know what they are.) There seems 
to be no way to automatically and reliably restore/extract a backup set.

Adding just a little meta-data to the created backups could enable this
functionality: I'm thinking a -search option to find the relevant 
archives and -restore to extract from the relevant archives.

3) There are three Project Admins: edwinh, jjreynold and pholcomb.
EdwinH, the only one to ever post to the mailing list, last did so
2004/01/30 - over two years ago. Basically the project is without
contributors and maintainers.

I'm tempted to take a stab at adding the meta data to the created and 
backuped data and implementing -restore and -search. I've just never 
used a tape backup system, only to-disk. Would anybody we willing to 
test any such enhancements on a tape-drive?

Peter

-
#!/bin/bash
# I'd like to be able to restore src with newest file2,
# file3 and file4 in it. (And no file1)
# Impossible with current flexbackup, though.

mkdir src

echo line  src/file1
echo line  src/file2
echo line  src/file3
echo line  src/file4
flexbackup -c flexbackup.conf -set test -level 0

rm src/file1
echo anotherline  src/file2
chmod go-rwx src/file3
ls -l src

sleep 60
flexbackup -c flexbackup.conf -set test -level 1

-- 
Peter Valdemar Mørch
http://www.morch.com

-
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[flexbackup-help] Patch for sub current_time() to behave as documented

[Peter Valdemar Mørch]

Hi there,

The TODO says:

Multiple backups launched within the same second clobber each other's
logs/filenames


Likewise, the comment for current_time() says:
# Return current time in ctime format if normal
# in MMDDHHMM.SS format if 'numeric' is given

In fact, for stock 1_2_1, the second is omitted from e.g. file names, 
and so the problem from the TODO is really that all backups launched 
within the same minute have the same names.


Here is a patch so it will behave as documented. Alternatively, we
should patch current_time()'s comment and the comment in the TODO. (Less
preferred)

Peter

--
Peter Valdemar Mørch
http://www.morch.com
Index: flexbackup
===
RCS file: /cvsroot/flexbackup/flexbackup/flexbackup,v
retrieving revision 1.185
diff -u -w -r1.185 flexbackup
--- flexbackup  10 Oct 2003 14:12:09 -  1.185
+++ flexbackup  28 Jul 2006 12:57:17 -
@@ -3687,7 +3687,7 @@
 my $current_time = time;
 
 if (defined($format) and ($format eq 'numeric')) {
-   $string = strftime(%Y%m%d%H%M, localtime($current_time));
+   $string = strftime(%Y%m%d%H%M.%S, localtime($current_time));
 } elsif (defined($format) and ($format eq 'ctime')) {
$string = strftime(%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y, localtime($current_time));
 } else {
-
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