Thanks to all for answering, and particularly Holger for your thoughtful response. Before approaching the "social/concept" side, I'd like to be clear - from a purely technical POV - about my main question: can rsync be made to treat the "meta-filesystem root" /cygwin as a ShareName?
-------------- Since the larger picture, although perhaps off-topic, seems to be of interest I'll pursue it a bit. Regarding your comments on structure - unfortunately I (as must we all)deal with reality as it presents itself, and ultimately have little say in day-to-day ICT usage policies. Believe it or not it's safe to say I'm the most structure-minded person here. Fortunately some of the social factors are supportive, perhaps different from the norm in the western corporate world: - the users are heavily invested in the value of the data; they will personally suffer much more from its loss than their employer - management oversight controls can be put in place, no problems with enforcement; strong culture of obedience, draconian penalties the norm > no, that will not work. Simple reason: your backup history will contain the > files backed up on one day, and the next day, when the drive isn't connected, > they will appear to have been deleted (or changed to what now happens to be > connected under the same path). Inevitably, the day the disk *is* connected > will end up being an incremental backup and will thus expire, whether or not > you have more recent backups of the data. Even full backups can expire while > older backups are still kept if you use an exponential scheme. In order to highlight the technical problems I perhaps overstated them here. When a given drive is visible to BackupPC, it *does* have a "home" on one particular host and will usually be mapped to the same drive letter. True, that drive is sometimes there and sometimes not, so let's try to overcome the problems you've raised as simply as possible. Preserving ancient historical versions of files is not a priority, so let's assume full backups only and a "solid" retention policy, always discarding oldest first. Therefore when a restore is needed, we only need to look for the most recent set that includes that drive. But there is a possibility that another client machine got backed up with the drive attached more recently than its usual host - I'm not depending on this, but would like if possible to take advantage of it, especially since backing it up from multiple locations will only cost time and bandwidth, not disk space. In the restore scenario, say the owner is Andy - he'll know that Betty and Charles have also be working with that drive, so it'll be relatively easy to check their host records as well. Which brings me back to my original question - I'd really like to know we're grabbing whatever data is currently mounted on a given client PC, without having to know about it ahead of time. >> my question here is specifically to try to set up config.pl to avoid having >> to create and maintain customized hostname.pl's. Is that possible? Thanks again for your (plural) help. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Why Cloud-Based Security and Archiving Make Sense Osterman Research conducted this study that outlines how and why cloud computing security and archiving is rapidly being adopted across the IT space for its ease of implementation, lower cost, and increased reliability. Learn more. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51425301/ _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
