user data sync (Re: "Stateless Linux" project)

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Sep 14, 2004, Havoc Pennington <hp at redhat.com> wrote:

> In any case, imagine you have two laptops, "Thinkpad" and "Inspiron",
> and a workstation "Optiplex".

Something you might want to throw into the brain-storming: consider
removable disks.  I like to keep most of my data in big, fast
removable hard drives, such that I can quickly switch from desktop to
notebook, by simply moving the disks around.  Sure enough, I don't
always want to carry the extra weight when I'm on the road, so I have
local copies of the home dir that's in the removable disks in the
notebook, and I do have a minimal home dir in the desktop as well,
such that I can log into it even when the removable storage is
connected to the notebook.  How would you handle this scenario of
having the master home dir in removable storage, with local (partial?)
copies of the home dir in each box.

> Just having reliable homedir backup, plus the above UI, would be very
> useful and dramatically better than what most people use today.

The only thing I don't quite like in this idea is the name.  To me,
backups are snapshots of filesystems that you archive for relatively
long periods of time, often in multiple full and incremental copies.
In this case, you're only keeping the most-recent snapshot of the
filesystem, so I'd rather use a different name.  I'm afraid no good
suggestion occurs to me.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}