Prototype for the time machine similar solution as you noted in h-u-b whiteboard.

[Sivan Greenberg]

Hi Robert!

(CCing my two backup team colleagues for review and feedback, and to 
-devel to raise attention and feedback)

In response to:

"Robert Carr 2006-11-15: Any thoughts on a transparent version based 
backup? Through the backup interface allow users to specify directories, 
and use inotify to watch files in the directory for modification and 
back them up to a hidden file with timestamp appended on modify. Also 
create an interface where users can easily "scroll back a day" and see 
what the folder looked like then. So far I have completed (as a proof of 
concept more than anything) a python based implementation of the 
backend, but no GUI components. Additionally allow the backup files to 
be stored on external medium such as a USB flash drive. This might merit 
a separate specification, but I thought I would check for views here 
before creating a new one. Similar in idea to Apples Time Machine in OSX 
Leopard"

  This is indeed an interesting and useful application of inotify. 
Hhaving something like this for feisty or more probably feisty+1 would 
rock. Since simple off local backups were our first prio with regards to 
backups at all, home user backup resulted with the feature set as 
depicted on the specification page.

Have you given thought to how to make sure user's HD doesn't get filled 
with all the data that we back up? I suggest backup only the part of the 
file that was changed, there are couple of ways to do that already.

  I do see your idea as a part of a full featured, flexible and useful 
data protection and recovery suite. They can be listed according to 
urgency and severity of damage we are trying to recover from:
1) Locally isolated file damage, common use case being accidentally 
overwriting a system conffile or loosing small home content - this is 
where you're suggestions fills the need.
2) Large loss of personal settings and home folder content, for example 
an HD crash or an accidental (or malicious rm -rf) erase - hubackup is 
the answer here.
3) Large scale system area damage - for example loss of the / partition 
when you have your home on a separate one - hubackup-ng should be the 
solution here, allowing to restore system files and system settings 
including but not limited to databases physical storage as well as using 
something a generalisation of something like [1] to automatically 
request similar programs to close and flush their internal DBs in order 
to avoid back up of inconsistent content.
4) Complete disaster recovery, combining (2)+(3) adding a resuce from 
boot feature to the backup program along side shipping restore 
functionalities OOTB in a desktop or installation CD.

  Cheers,

Sivan

(P.S. Please use either the features system in LP or use a development 
oriented mailing list to discuss these, the whiteboard seems not the 
best place for this)