Re: [rdiff-backup-users] feature requests and notes

[Ben Escoto]

On Sat, 1 Nov 2003 23:58:56 -0800 Ben Escoto <address@hidden> wrote:
> One question that would have to be decided is what interface to give
> for access to this metadata file.
...
> It seems compressed flat text files like the current metadata files
> wouldn't be the best choice for this.  A traditional file system
> layout would be better, but traditional file systems still need to be
> indexed like with locate/updatedb, which violates the concept of
> one-pass backing-up and indexing.  Perhaps some even more complicated
> format is called for?

I've just thought of one way (the Right Way?) to do this:

Every night the Universal Indexer is run, which creates a database of
metadata indexed every which way.  The resulting file can be mounted
as a filesystem, but also provides fast access to searches that
traditional file systems don't.

When rdiff-backup or another backup program is run, it can simply
request from the Indexer a list of files that have changed since
yesterday.  There would be no need to traverse the file tree twice.
If the backup program wanted to save an easily searchable record of
the metadata, it could simply copy the Universal Index into the
repository.


-- 
Ben Escoto

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