On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 12:25:57AM -0600, Ben Escoto wrote: > For the people that voted for repository editing, what did you want > exactly? Here's the first thing that crossed my mind: you have a > repository at /repo and maybe a directory like /repo/dir that is > taking up too much space. You could run something like: > > rdiff-backup-editor delete /repo/dir
That would be very useful. I have had a need of this on many occasions when I decide (for space or performance reasons) to exclude something from the backup. But adding it to the exclude list doesn't remove the history of it from the archive. On archives with long history (and I would ideally like some of my archives to keep history forever), this means that you can never really reclaim that space. Make sure it works on individual files as well as directories -- I would suggest allowing the same syntax currently used in include/exclude lists, including globbing. > > that would delete /repo/dir and remove all history of it from the > repository. It might also be possible to do something like: > > rdiff-backup-editor move /repo/dir /repo/newname > > which would move /repo/dir to /repo/newname, and alter all the history > so that all the changes that took place in /repo/dir now seem like > they took place in /repo/newname. Or what else did you have in mind? You would only want to do that to mirror a similar move in the source filesystem, but rdiff-backup wil pick up that move anyway. The one advantage of doing it as above would be to save the space taken up by the gzipped copy of the file in its old location. I suppose that if you're moving big files or directory trees around, that could be a lot of space, but you also have to remember to coordinate the repository change with the filesystem change. But you lose the record of the rename, which means you will no longer be able to restore to the original state -- unless the repository remembers when the move took place and restores appropriately, as the more modern version control systems do. Overall, I'd rank this a much lower priority than the delete feature. I'd like to echo the requests to delete particular increments (i.e., merge increments). This could be used if some part of the source filesystem temporarily grew very large but you don't really want to save that data. You could then just delete/merge all the increments that were made during that period. But more importantly, it can be used to implement the traditional daily/weekly/monthly backup retention schemes. For example, you may want to keep daily increments for a month, then weekly increments for 6 months, then monthly increments indefinitely. This could be implemented as a script (outside of rdiff-backup) which deletes/merges the daily increments into weeklies once they are more than a month old, then merges weeklies into monthlies. For filesystems with lots of changes, this could save a lot of space. And one more idea -- splitting/merging repositories. I currently back up different parts of my filesystems into different repositories, mostly because I want different backup frequencies and retention policies. For example, I back up mail every 15 minutes and keep increments only for 30 days, but I back up /usr only once a day and keep it for at least a year. I split up the filesystem using a set of fairly complex include/exclude rules that define each repository. Sometimes, I might want to change my mind about how things are divided up, so it would be useful to be able to merge two repositories together, or split one repository into two, presumably by using include/exclude lists to define what should remain in the repository and what should be split out into another repository. This ranks as a "nice to have" feature for me, but once the other repository editing features are in place, this might turn out to be easy to implement. > Also more generally, why do you want to edit an existing repository? > Is it to save disk space? Yup, mostly to save disk space, but also to fix mistakes (such as backing up something you didn't mean to, which might include sensitive data -- passwords, etc..) Randall _______________________________________________ rdiff-backup-users mailing list at [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rdiff-backup-users Wiki URL: http://rdiff-backup.solutionsfirst.com.au/index.php/RdiffBackupWiki
