Hello John, I've actually been working on this exact problem right now. I'm currently developing BackupPC::Xfer::Local so that I can do consistency checks and throw down some unit tests on my diffs without waiting on rsync or tar :-)
On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 7:44 PM, John Kinsella <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey guys - I've been pondering adding a diff-like functionality to > BackupPC so I can see the difference between two (text) files. Was > browsing the roadmap and saw this is on the to-do list...I just wanted > to check to see if anybody is working on this before I start? > I've got a little bit of work, but it's far from functional. > I'm interested in the functionality from a security point of view - > right now I use (ftimes|tripwire|osiris|etc) to do host-based IDS. > Knowing that a file was modified is great, but the next step is to > know what was changed - I'm thinking BackuPC can provide that info to > me fairly easily. Thinking of a Web interface, as well as a command > line interface to do this. I think we have different interests. I want to generate diffs between two backup sets and generate the result as a tarball that would be applied to update a past snapshot tarball, and you are looking for patch files. We could work in tandem; both of these functionalities would be useful. > > As part of the functionality, I'm thinking I'll also tackle another > item on the road map - the ability to see in which backup sets a > specified file was changed. These two features will allow me to have > a use case similar to the following: > * IDS (or BackupPC, see below) notifies me that a file of > significance to me was modified > * Using either web or cmd line client, I get a list of revisions of > the file that BackupPC knows about > * Again using either web or cmd line, I specify two revisions that I > would like to see the differences between > The general approach to developing BackupPC functionality is to write binaries that can be used on the command line, and have the web interface parse that data. > One really hand thing I haven't figured out yet that would make this > work better is if I could pass in an argument of the full path to a > file I care about (and a specified server, of course), and the > BackupPC system could return info related to that file. Right now, > full path info isn't kept in BackupPC (to my knowledge) so I'll have > to try and figure out how to pull that off... If the info hasn't been changed between backup sets, it could be reconstructed (path + sharename + filename). The path & sharename may change between backup sets, so be sure you're retrieving them from the right place. Hope this helps! -- Paul Mantz http://www.mcpantz.org BackupPC - Network Backup with De-Duplication http://www.backuppc.com Zmanda - Open source backup and recovery http://www.zmanda.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Create and Deploy Rich Internet Apps outside the browser with Adobe(R)AIR(TM) software. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web. Download the Adobe AIR SDK and Ajax docs to start building applications today-http://p.sf.net/sfu/adobe-com _______________________________________________ BackupPC-devel mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-devel Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
