"Stateless Linux" project

Havoc Pennington hp at redhat.com
Tue Sep 14 23:48:41 UTC 2004


On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 16:31 -0700, Per Bjornsson wrote:
> Such a system keeps track of what files got changed on what side. It
> pretty much punts to the user if changes have been made to a file on
> both ends. (You can plug in a merge tool for merging text files though;
> I don't think that there is really any hope to "merge" more complex
> documents with any particular degree of automation.)

The merge part is where we think a large number of users will just go
"huh?" ... though it doesn't hurt to have two-way sync available, it
might be sort of a high effort to benefit ratio because of the UI
problem. 

> > The hard questions on homedir backup seem to be around how it interfaces
> > to an "industrial strength" backup solution, i.e. we can keep the
> > homedir synced to a network share pretty easily, but how does that
> > interact with incremental backups and so forth.
> 
> Well backing up the disconnected notebook on a main backup server sounds
> hard! ;) In what scenario does just backing up the server side fail
> (apart from losing any changes since the last check-in)? As far as I can
> tell the backups should never really change any file state (apart from
> possibly atime) on the files?

Dan's stuff right now keeps incremental backups (it uses rsync with the
option to hardlink a new tree based on an old tree) and so the questions
are e.g. when do you throw out the old backups, etc.

Maybe the right answer is to make the rsync-to-server thingy dead stupid
(no incremental backup or anything like that, though maybe it should
ensure each sync is atomic by having two copies) and rely on backing up
the server for getting incrementals and so forth.

Havoc






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