On 10/14/05, Ian Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Organising backups is a challenging and critical task which should not
> be left to the naive user.
My idea currently is to do backups to local filesystem and then have a
configurable interval after which a dialog would pop up telling user
that it would be wise to copy a backup to a removable media right
about now. If user agrees, then a programm is to be started that would
make a good guess about what exactly should be copied (last full
snapshot + incremental snapshots since then, but sometimes making a
new full snapshot would be better), detect what removable media
options are available in this particular system and provide user with
the choices. Total size of copieable data would be displayed and
number of discs for CD/DVD backup will be estimated (pessimistically
:)). The user would be asked to mark the backup media with the name of
the snapshot - basically a timestamp, posibly shortened to "yyyymmdd"
and "nn/tt" for indication of number of current media and the total
number of media in the snapshot. Verification of written data should
also be done.
I do not intend of storing any information of any past backups in the
system outside the actual directories of said backup snapshots. I
think that it is only worth showing a backup if we actually have it.
Lets consider a typical user: he backups his home folder to
/var/backup daily to be safe against accidental deletition or
corruption of his data and once a mounth writes a backup snapshot to
DVD-RW for the case of the hard drive crash. What would be the use
case where such user would need a system database of all backups? Is
there any other use case where that would be nessesary? I can only
think of one - if you regularely copy incremental backups to CDs and
want to find out in which backup last version of a particular file is
found. That is a valid use case, but I do not see this use scenario to
be important enough to impose all the costs of system backup database
management.
--
Best regards,
Aigars Mahinovs mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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