Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Discussion of poll winning feature: repository editing

[Chris Wilson]

Hi all,

On Mon, 2006-01-02 at 15:14 -0800, Blair Zajac wrote:

> Not that interested in handling moves, but I think the better way would to 
> use 
> inode tracking instead and let rdiff-backup handle it automatically.

I would really like to see rdiff-backup track files by strong checksum
(e.g. SHA1). 

If a new file is created which has the same checksum as an existing file
in the repository, rdiff-backup should treat that as a copy operation,
which can be executed (and checked) very efficiently by the remote side.

If a new file is created which has the same checksum as a file that was
just deleted from the repository, rdiff-backup should treat that as a
move operation, which can also be executed (and checked) very
efficiently by the remote side.

Since restoring is an occasional operation, performance might not matter
too much, in which case the metadata stored for a move or copy operation
could be equivalent to the ("delete" and) "create" used at present. 

However, to make this really efficient, it would be nice to store the
copy or move as such in the metadata, so that restoring a backup through
such a point would be equivalent to deleting the copy or moving the file
back to its original location.

That's just my two cents, I will still love rdiff-backup even if it
never implements these features :-)

> > Also more generally, why do you want to edit an existing repository?
> > Is it to save disk space?

Yes, me too.

Cheers, Chris.
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