Restore behavior for 'current_mirror.*.snapshot ?'

[Jason Piterak]

Hi Ben,
  
> Well, to tell you the truth, I never thought that people would want to
> restore the current backup using rdiff-backup.  The
> "current_mirror.XXX.snapshot" just has the form it does because I
> needed to record the time of the last backup, and I already had code
> for sticking times into filenames that ended in ".snapshot".  :-)

<grin>
  The problem I'm running into is that the current restore command is good
for admins or even power users, but most users just want to be able to say:
"I want a restore of these files or directories as of this date
("2002-04-24T10:51:55-0400" or "-1 day" or "-1 week"), and I want it in this
directory." 
  Eventually, I'd like users to be able to access their restore from a Web
interface, (because I'm lazy, and don't want to do it). This means the
script will probably be in Perl (I know, but we don't have anyone who knows
Python)... Right now, I'm just doing a proof-of-concept   in Bash for some
automated backup routines.

> 
>     But I can see that this behavior may not be totally obvious to
> people who aren't me.  It shouldn't be too hard to make restoring the
> "current_mirror" do what it looks like it should do, but I don't see a
> similarly intuitive way of restoring arbitrary files and directories
> that are current.  If only "current_mirror" works, that would seem to
> leave a strange asymmetry between the current and previous backups.
> 
  s'ok... I'll just change my program logic so that it says: 
    o Look in the corresponding rdiff-backup-data directory:
       - If the request is for a dir, look at the *.dir or *.missing files
in the dir
          above requested restore dir.
       - If the request is for a file, look at the *.missing or *.snapshot
files in the
          corresponding filepath.
    o If there's an rdiff file older and newer than the requested date, then
restore 
       using rdiff-backup and the older file.
    o If there is no newer rdiff file, then copy the files from the current
archive.

   ... Sound about right?

Thanks!
--Jason

> 
> --
> Ben Escoto

---
Jason Piterak
System Analyst
CIS Technical Services
33 Main St., Suite 302
Nashua, NH 03064
(603) 889-4684 - FAX (603) 889-0534



> -----Original Message-----
> From: ben@stanford.edu [mailto:ben@stanford.edu]On Behalf Of 
> Ben Escoto
> Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2002 5:34 PM
> To: Jason Piterak; rdiff-backup@keywest.Stanford.EDU
> Subject: Re: Restore behavior for 'current_mirror.*.snapshot ?' 
> 
> 
> >>>>> "JP" == Jason Piterak <Jason>
> >>>>> wrote the following on Thu, 18 Apr 2002 17:33:05 -0400
> 
>   JP> Hi Ben (et al), Just got a chance to look at the changes in
>   JP> 0.7.2 with include and exclude commands... Very cool.
>   
>   JP>   Mailing about a different issue... What is/should be the
>   JP> behavior of rdiff-backup when you want to do a restore of the
>   JP> current version of an archive?...
>     ...
>   JP>   Now, technically, I should be able to just copy the content of
>   JP> the archive directory (sans 'rdiff-backup-data') to the
>   JP> destination directory... But it'd be nice to keep things simple
>   JP> and use rdiff-backup (and my current scripts) to do the restore
>   JP> ;-)...
> 
>