Homedir backup (was Re: "Stateless Linux" project)

Kyrre Ness Sjobak kyrre at solution-forge.net
Wed Sep 15 20:23:46 UTC 2004


Hmm... This could be applied on a (much) smaller case as well (i will
use myself as a use case):

On my "big" machine, i have an 80 GB disk - and most of what is used is
in my home folder. I also have a laptop, which i can bring with me.

Imagine that there was a small app that came preinstalled with fedora.
It could be written i python or whatever - and it had a nice GUI. When
activated, it would start when i booted my laptop (or at least when i
logged into GNOME) - in the systray, beside the (pretty usless)
RHN-applet. It would then try to connect to my "big" pc when i mount the
NFS share (i use NFS to share my big pc's /home/kyrre to my laptop - it
has the option "user" in fstab, which makes it possible to mount it from
the GNOME gui), and if it detected any differences, it would become red
or something - telling me to sync. I could then double-click it, and hit
"sync" in order to sync the stuff - and it would sync, displaying nice
blue GTK progress bars - one for each individual file, and one for
total.

Then it would go back to its happy, green/blue state.

And ofcourse, if i right-clicked the aplet, it would display a "sync"
thing - effectively doing the sync in the background, but allowed me to
foreground it to see the nice progress bars, and background it again,
and a "properties" option. There i could decide what should trigger an
attempt to connect (and check whats new), (manual, connected to net
(with some ways to id WHICH net), when fs XX is mounted etc etc), and
which folders should be synced. For me, that would be the "documents"
folder - not the download, music etc. So simply display a checkbox-list
(something like the one in epiphanies bookmarks - but with the ability
to dive recursively into directories).

Just some small vissions. And it would be extremely usefull as well - i
am pretty shure that i am not the only person with a similar use case...

Kyrre Ness Sjøbæk

ons, 15.09.2004 kl. 21.08 skrev seth vidal:
> > monstrous. Mine is too, as are bunches of other folders floating through
> > my home directory and system. Perhaps a simple standardized home
> > directory layout is in order.
> 
> There is no such thing as a 'standardized homedir'
> 
> > For instance:
> > One might have a ~/tmp into which ~/rpm/BUILD and other junk
> > accumulators would be linked. It would have a no-backup policy. Then
> > perhaps a ~/static or some such where one could put their music files,
> > movie rips, ~/rpm/SRPMS, random tarball downloads, fedora install tree
> > mirrors, or whatever else they might be hauling around that never
> > changes. Such a folder could (and should) have a different (lower
> > priority, server-wins?) sync policy than, for instance ~/Maildir (high
> > priority, last update wins?). 
> > 
> > I realize rsync exclude lists can work around more complex layouts, but
> > I think the idea here is to automate and simplify. In addition, I want
> > 2-way sync on at least some part of my home directory. Splitting it up
> > into a few different policies makes automated sync conflict resolution
> > easier.
> 
> The exclude and include lists are trivial.
> 
> Open nautilus window or gnome file selector box:
> drag out the folders you do not want to backup.
> 
> And we're done.
> 
> -sv
> 
> 





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