On Sat, 2 Dec 2006, Nick Guenther wrote:
> On 12/2/06, Vim Visual <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Hola, cariño:
> >
> > I was even thinking of using subversion to "live" in a repository and
> > svn add and commit from time to time... but then paranoia knocked
> >
>
> Why couldn't you set up a a vnd on the usb disk, and a svn on the vnd?
> This would be slow in speed, but it would allow you to only have to
> backup diffs which would save you much more time.
>
> -Nick
I think the aversion is twofold -- speed and unknown software in
subversion. We can, I think, discount the latter and benchmark the
former, but the speed problem is going to be in decrypting large
files from the vnd to calculate diffs, and the slow USB (I don't
know what version USB is involved, so I've been assuming it's slower
than justice) overhead. Also, we don't know the internal structure
of these files, and how they change. Rewritten? 10 random bytes
changeing in a 1G file? SQL stuff? Better not to know or guess.
Basically, I've proposed using rdist to localhost to do this, same
solution as yours except for rdist from the base distribution instead
of svn. Otherwise (correct me if I'm wrong!) we're thinking alike.
I'm unfamiliar with svn, so I assume it's like rcs/cvs. The advantage
I see to rdist is that it results in a mirror of various directory
trees on the USB disk, making any manual inspection or restoration
"self-documenting". Yet the idea of storing diffs of some kind is
very enticing, especially if they could be computed on the fly,
stored on the "master" (the laptop's main disk[s]) and saved to
"slave" (the USB) batch-wise.
My long-winded posts are serving to educate first me and then Vim
(and anybody else who is interested, including Mr Google and Mr
Archives) about "what is a filesystem", "what is a [s]vnd" and "what
is rdist".
Maybe I've missed something here. Maybe all the diff calculating
would be done on plaintext files on the "master"? There's a design
point here: the whole data collection has to be reconstructable if
the laptop is crushed by a bus. So "version 0.0.0" of the data has
to be on the USB. But that's no penalty, really, just a one-time
event. [thinking out loud here]. I need to look at subversion.
Can you "advocate" it over rcs/cvs? In a way it's all same-same.
Another design-point -- the data collection has to be present and
usable regardless of the USB, i.e. the "repository" has to reside
on the laptop; the repository would have to be mirrored to the USB.
Maybe subversion has an efficient repository mirroring feature.
make'ing fetch of subversion now .... yikes, it's huge and it smells
like it wants python, and it might install a half-dozen libraries
of its own. My idea of a system utility is something that lives
in /usr/bin and takes up about 55KB of disk. Like rdist ;-)
(Source code of rdist and rdistd tar to a .tgz of 76KB -- subversion
is around 6000KB for the source.tgz).
I chatter too much.
Dave
--
"Confound these wretched rodents! For every one I fling away,
a dozen more vex me!" -- Doctor Doom_______________________________________________
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