FC backup policy was Re: Fedora Core 2 wishlists

[Jef Spaleta]

Ah look someone who hasn't learn not to engage me in long winded
and potentially flame filled rants....

Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> Ah, but the problem is, which tools?  There are many ways to copy >
data;

I'm not looking for the perfect end-all-be-all backup solution.
There is of course room for highly flexible and highly configurable
backup solutions as well as something meant and design for the mundane
user. If they can be the same underlying toolset..fine..if not, oh well.
I'm concerned about offering a backup solution meant for the people
outside the 1% who know what they want as a backup solution.  I'm
looking for something that can integrate well with the existing config
toolset...cough python cough...and aimed at the same audience.

> If we make backup and restore REALLY REALLY easy, then the whole 
> idea of trying new bleeding edge distros becomes much less risky.  > I
can load a rawhide distro, have it smash to bits, and be back to > last
night's FC1

Again I'm not looking for a really easy solution to let people
deliberately screw around with their systems and make it easy to
recover. There is a market for that assuredly, I'm looking for something
that provides some rudimentary and basic backup solution
that meets the needs 90% of the userbase and to work that solution into
a policy that the fedora core installation encourages as default effort
at backing up data. If there is a way to make the parition scheme aware
of backup partitions that would be just dandy...but the trade-offs of
trying to do that i would imagine are a high barrier for that feature.

And having had an offlist discussion already... i think i've been
convinced that rdiff-backup would be a good basis for the easybake
backup solution.
http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/

Why? its in python..that should make it very easy to integrate with the
existing system-config-* toolset that is in fedora....and perhaps
anaconda if there is a need. AND...little birdies tell me that someone
very clever is working on extending rdiff-backup to be
aware of which files are (un)modified and (un)managed by the rpmdb.
Think about that... why backup files locally that are owned by an rpm
package, when it would be just as easy to just reinstall the rpm.
http://naeblis.cx/blog/.

It's not a full system recovery image creation tool like mondo is, but i
personally think the backup to harddrive(possibly over a network) that
rdiff-backup provides would serve a majority the mundane users well
enough. Wrap a tree view based system-config-gui over it to select which
files are included/excluded from the cronjob run backup..and a similar
gui to do restores..you have a reasonable start at providing an
easy-bake solution to backuping data to a large harddrive parition
either on the lan or locally.

-jef