>>>>> Sheldon Hearn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>>> wrote the following on Sat, 12 Nov 2005 12:02:45 +0200 > > I think this is another edge case that speaks to the value of > entirely virtualizing the backup store. In other words, don't rely > AT ALL on the capabilities of the filesystem used to store backups, > except for those capabilities common to all documented as being > supported for rdiff-backup servers. In real terms, this leaves you > with pretty short names and just about nothing else. ... > At the extreme, every object gets a serial number which is used as > its name in the backup store's filesystem. That serial number is > used to index into the metadata store, to discover the properties of > the object as it should be restored, including ownership, > permissions, extended attributes, NTFS permissions, creation, > modification and access times and checksums.
This is the direction my original long-filename suggestion was moving, since the repository filenames/paths don't have much to do with the source filenames. Also I think there could be a really great backup program that worked like this. But this is basically the way most backup programs work, and from the beginning the premise of rdiff-backup was that it made a mirror. The best backup system that used your scheme would have a different architecture, and might not have all that much in common with a mirror+increment system. (For instance, if I were to your scheme from scratch I would optimize for random access of older data, so it could be mounted with FUSE or similar with decent performance.) > It sidesteps an entire family of problems that arises out of what I > consider to be a design limitation -- rdiff-backup does not seem to > have been originally designed to be as cross-platform a utility as > people would now like it to be. True, sticking with the "preserve everything, but also make a mirror" idea leads to extra problems, but solving these new problems can also be an advantage. For instance, rdiff-backup has become a pretty flexible copy/mirroring program that is better than rsync in many ways. -- Ben Escoto
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