user data sync (Re: "Stateless Linux" project)

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Sep 15 20:06:00 UTC 2004


On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:41:52 -0400, Havoc Pennington <hp at redhat.com> wrote:
> So the "Copy of Inspiron" is a read-only backup of your Inspiron homedir
> (kept on some network share). The other icons are the actual homedirs on
> those systems. If you imagine I now connect the Inspiron, my Optiplex
> desktop changes in real time:

Yes that's right.. im going to beat the dead horse.
"Copy of whatever" sure sounds like a mirror to me... did you know
that rdiff-backup can produce a full "up2date" mirror of the
incrementally backuped directory, plus a hidden directory tree to
store the incremental differences.  The UI you describe sounds very
much like a slick way to connect to a read-only network shared
rdiff-backup'd home directory to me.

Now of course.. i dont have skill to make the UI slickness you describe work.
But what if... I came up with a stupid hacky way to produce that sort
of switching idea
using a network mountable share of an rdiff-backup'd directory. A
stupid little cronjob to detect if the real read-write mountpoint of
interest unmounts, and then mounts the read-only rdiffbackup
mountpoint from elsewhere on the network. And i created a dumb...very
very very dumb automated rdiffbackup script that would attempt to keep
the backup synced with the real mountpoint when it was active on
something like a reasonable sync timescale once an hour or less. Would
that interest you as a lead in into something more sophisticated?

-jef"i think the dead horse likes it"spaleta





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