Don't know if I've totally missed something, but for local backups, isn't it possible to use the snapshotting feature of LVM? Should be quite fast, I think? Regards / Ulrik <div>On 11/15/06, Sivan Greenberg <<a href="mailto:sivan@ubuntu.com">sivan@ubuntu.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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) -- ubuntu-devel mailing list <a href="mailto:ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com">ubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com</a> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: <a href="https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel">https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel</a> </blockquote></div>