Backup Central

Wolfgang Dautermann <wolfgang.dautermann < at > fh-joanneum.at>
wrote the following on Sun, 22 Jan 2006 17:13:54 +0100
Dr. Scott S. Jones wrote:
In general, an attempt is made to guarantee compatibility only between
different minor versions of the same stable series.

Bye the way: What about upgrades on the server-side? E.g. I am running
currently 1.0.0, but there are newer versions (1.0.4, 1.1.5) - can one
expect that one can re-use the existing backups? Or should one 'backup
the backups' and start with an empty directory for new backups?

Old repositories are always forwards compatible---you (should) never
need to erase your backup directory because you want to use a new
version.

And I have some additional feature-requests:

(1) As far as I saw, there is no 'ls'-Feature, e.g.
rdiff-backup --ls-at-time 2006-01-19 /backups/daute
should output something like "ls -la /backups/daute" at a previous time.

Yes, good point. I wonder if I add this though, then someone will
want various sorting options, someone will think -la displays too much
information, etc. Personally I'm happy with -la output. Can anyone
think of a better display/format, or of a more flexible way to do
this?

(2) rdiff-Backup should be able to parse the date-formats from the own
output. E.g. rdiff-backup --list-increment-sizes outputs something like
"Sun Jan 22 00:05:04 2006 4.08 GB 4.08 GB (current mirror)", then
rdiff-backup --list-at-time "Sun Jan 22 00:05:04 2006" /path/to/backup
should work...

Ok, patch at

http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/rdiff-backup/rdiff_backup/Time.py?root=rdiff-backup&r1=1.12&r2=1.13&makepatch=1&diff_format=u


--
Ben Escoto

Ben Escoto wrote:
Yes, good point. I wonder if I add this though, then someone will
want various sorting options, someone will think -la displays too much
information, etc. Personally I'm happy with -la output. Can anyone
think of a better display/format, or of a more flexible way to do
this?

Too much information should not be a problem, one can easy remove
unneeded information (for example with some shell tools (grep, sed,
...). various sorting options might also be done by external programs.

I see two main uses for such a feature:

- enable the user to check, when a (modified, accidently removed) file
or directory was still there. For that, especially the timestamp and the
size of a file is important, a "ls -la" like output is probably exactly
that, what a user wants...

- simplify the programming of tools like web based restore utilities,
GUIs, ... For such tools one should provide as much as information as
possible, a program can always ignore unneeded information.

(2) rdiff-Backup should be able to parse the date-formats from the own
output.
Ok, patch at

http://cvs.savannah.nongnu.org/viewcvs/rdiff-backup/rdiff_backup/Time.py?root=rdiff-backup&r1=1.12&r2=1.13&makepatch=1&diff_format=u

Thanks.

Bye, Wolfgang

--
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Automotive Engineering & Railway Engineering
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http://www.fh-joanneum.at/fzt/