Some fundamental usability issues

John McCabe-Dansted gmatht at gmail.com
Thu May 8 14:43:05 UTC 2008


On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia at di.unipi.it>
wrote:

> Il giorno gio, 08/05/2008 alle 20.28 +0800, John McCabe-Dansted ha
> scritto:
> > If we define a users work as a user's typing, we could easily save
> > this permanently.
>
> Not quite :) What if I "type" in a video editor and save a changed
> 600mb .avi file? We should record input instead of changed data, but
> that's way out of scope for a versioning filesystem.


I was thinking of explicitly mentioning keylogging. Keylogging is trivial,
*much* easier than a versioning filesystem. Replay is the problem.

For "easily diffable" files we can approximate the keylogging ideal in a
versioning filesystem by guessing whether this file is essentially "typing".
Avi files are not easily diffable in this sense, although e.g. many vector
graphics formats are. If versioning filesystems become popular, then it may
become common to save information such as "foo.avi =
bilinear_rescale(bar.avi,0.5)" along side foo.avi to aid in recovery (and
monitoring, and scripting and ...). We could even  add hooks to manage such
information, but lets leave that for version 9.0 ;)

In any case, the point I was trying to make is reasonable to limit the
bandwidth entering the archive rather than the ultimate size of the archive.
50c a month for a DVD-ROM to backup onto is much less than any of the other
computer related expenses I have. Additionally write-only media is much
safer than an on disk backup, write-only media protects me from 'rm -rf', it
protects me from harddisk failure and if I am sufficiently paranoid I can
easily move the old DVD disks offsite.

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia
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