On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 17:30 -0600, Michael Terry wrote: > Is GNOME interested in shipping an official backup program? I (as a > long-time lurker) haven't ever noticed discussion about it. > > I feel the backup market currently has a lot of almost-there UIs and > lots of duplicated effort. That might either mean it's a good time > for GNOME to step in and polish one, or that it's a good time for > GNOME to wait for one to 'win'. I'm not even sure that GNOME cares > particularly, but it seems like a hole in the market. > > For full disclosure, I am notably biased in any such discussion as the > maintainer of one of those almost-there duplicated efforts (an app > called deja-dup). But I'd like to think that I'm more interested in a > good user experience than my own ego. > > -mt I guess that many people have different requirements. I thought some time ago about writing my own one and about some features I'd like to have[1] - What format? .tar.bz2 seems to be good enought for many documents. But Photos for example are large and rarly change. Something similar to rsync + hardlinks would save much space. And yes - it does matter as most of data in $HOME (at least im my case) are photos (around 14 GB about 33%) [important, practically append-only data], music (around 7 GB) [it is practically podcasts + cache of part of CD collection legally ripped] and downloads/installed data [can be easily retrived, around 6 GB]. In total 27 GB (66%) which do not need to be copied each time. Also it seems logical that block medias (hd, cd/dvd/br-rw) and stream media (tapes, http) have different requirements. Write-once media (cd-r,dvd-r,br-r) have another set of requirements. Can different backups be applied for different catalogs? - Where can I save. I'd prefere system when I can backup on external drive which would be detected by partition UUID or something similar (or copied cached backups from hard disk to external drive). Some people would prefere network backup (scp, s3, ...). - Should it be encrypted? Encryption have many advantages but I'm not sure if it is possible to have anything else then full backup without providing private key to program with all it's disadvantages. However I belive that the user could be prompt for password during system/desktop boot. - Should it be run if user is not log in? I'd prefere system when even if user is not log into backup is still made (cron-like). - Tracker integration - backup does similar job to tracker indexer. I guess that files should be read once but it would require probably performance tests. - Snapshot integration. Filesystems of future (zfs, btrfs, ...) have support for snapshots. It would be benefitial if backup program make use of it. As power user I understend that I am not entirly in GNOME target but for example coping 37 GB of data each backup and 10 GB makes huge difference in speed (disks are cheap but - especially external - drives are not daemons of speed). Some of above question may be answered during design process so it is not the question about putting them in GUI. Some maybe can be autodetected. Regards [1] I haven't found any which would have them
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part