[tahoe-dev] integrate with an existing backup tool instead of writing our own?

[Nathan]

(As you might notice, I have mailing list backlog lag...)

It looks like pnotify may be preferable to inotify for portability
across unices (I have no experience aside from google hits):

http://mark.heily.com/pnotify/


A research project at the University of Colorado focused on filesystem
usage behavior, and for samples they ended up writing a cross-platform
filesystem hook library in C.  It was perhaps too low-level (it
signaled block read/write if I remember correctly).  However, it ran
efficiently enough to be installed on many workstations used for other
purposes.

I just googled a bit, but couldn't find it.  If there's more interest
I would spend more time digigng into this.


Nathan


On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 7:41 AM, zooko <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
> On Sep 26, 2008, at 8:05 AM, zooko wrote:
>
>  > Hm...  You know, we might be able to do a lot better than "15
>  > hours of rehashing every file" if we track dev,inode pairs
>  > along with size,mtime...  :-) We might be able to get it down
>  > to "2.6 minutes of traversing the filesystem checking that the
>  > shape of the tree and the dev,inode,size,mtime metadata still
>  > fits".
>
> And that makes me think that it would be even better if we would
> spend a millisecond accepting a notification from inotify [1]
> which says "Hello, this is the kernel speaking.  The directory
> formerly linked from '/home' under the name 'warner' has just
> been relinked into '/home' under the name 'brianwarner'.  Have a
> nice day!".
>
> And that makes me think that implementing a good, usable,
> high-performance backup tool is a non-trivial job and that we've
> been sitting around re-inventing the wheel, when really Tahoe
> ought to be integrated with duplicity [2], bacula [3], boxbackup
> [4], amanda [5], dirvish [6], um zu sync [7], backuppc [8], dar
> [9], hdup [10], or some of the other three hundred and eighty
> projects which are marked as "System :: Archiving :: Backup" on
> freshmeat.net: [11].
>
> Some of those tools already have inotify integration.  Many of
> them already have something that Tahoe does not have: a team of
> developers who like to do nothing more than sit around working on
> backup tools all day.
>
> Regards,
>
> Zooko
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inotify
> [2] http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
> [3] http://www.bacula.org/en/
> [4] http://www.boxbackup.org/
> [5] http://www.amanda.org/
> [6] http://www.dirvish.org/
> [7] http://freshmeat.net/projects/umzusync/
> [8] http://freshmeat.net/projects/backuppc/
> [9] http://freshmeat.net/projects/dar/
> [10] http://freshmeat.net/projects/hdup/
> [11] http://freshmeat.net/browse/137/
>
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