On Thu, Jun 26, 2003 at 05:56:46PM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Jason Komar wrote: > > On Thu, 2003-06-26 at 09:15, Keld J�rn Simonsen wrote: > > > >>Hi! > >> > >>I have just been to a MS marketing seesion for their Windows Server 2003 > >>and one of the few key selling points there is the volume shadowing > >>feature. This is a way to find deleted files, or older versions of > >>files (eg if you accidentially deleted some of the contents.) > >> > > Did they tell you how much it would cost for the storage to go with this? > > >>I would like to see that kind of functionality also in mdk 9.2. > >>It seems nice to have. > >> > >>What I think one could do is to reserve some space for backups. > >>Then one cron job could be run to make backups every day, or every > >>hour or so. Backups should not be taken of system files that are not > >>changed. Backups should be compressed and could be diffs. > >>When space is being tight some older versions should be deleted, > >>but maybe the original should be kept. Some excludsion list should be > >>available. > >> > >>There should then be a utility and gui to find older versions of > >>a file, given a specific file path. Users should be able to restore > >>only their own files. That is, the gui should be the normal file > >>browsing gui, whatever that be. > >> > >>Is there such a system for Linux and is it already in MDK? > >> > >>Best regards > >>keld > >> > > > > > > I don't know if there is a system like that for Linux, but it would be > > nice to see. > > > > This can be done with rsync in backup mode with hard links. I haven't > tried it yet though.
Yes, I am sure that a lot of bits and pieces already exist, but the big difference lies in packaging them all together and put it into the distribution so that it is a standard thing. Maybe drakbackup is the place to do it. > Remember, binary files (ie word docs) don't make nice diffs (usually > bigger than the file itself). If you have something that makes nice > diffs (OpenOffice.org xml), why have the filesystem do it when better > tools are available (ie CVS). If you don't have something that makes > nice diffs, you had better have lots of disk available. yes, diffs may not be efficient in space, for file types like .doc .rpm and .iso. However compression may be very good on .doc and other file types like .txt and .html and even binary files. I don't think it should be done in the specific filesystem, I think it should be a general tool that would work for the whole system and with different file systems (ext3, reiserfs, what have you.). > What's wrong with good old backups?? (amanda for instance). It is not so easy for a user to get access to the old files. Most times a user does not have access to system backups, and they do not set up backup themselves (they cry instead). I think a lot of users do not have backup set up. With the advent of big cheap disk like 80 GB being common nowadays, it costs something like 10 EUR to have a backup area of 5 GB. Having a standard option during installation of the MDK system to ensure backup could be a very good way to improve overall system roboustness. Maybe it could also be used to do a roll-back of the system to a specific state. Best regards keld
