-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
The Wednesday 2007-04-25 at 11:44 +0100, G.T.Smith wrote:
...
> The conclusion I am coming too is the the current time stamping
> mechanism is inadequate for anything but the crudest of time related
> file management, and possibly not even that given the way some things
> manage files...
....
> and time stamping was an option...If time stamping was reliable and
> consistent this could have been used to flag files to backup, it is not
> so it cant **sigh** I
The modification time can be used to know when to backup the data, and the
change time for the metadata. Meaning, if the modification timestamp has
not changed, but the change timestamp has, it should mean that the file
itself it's the same but the attributes have changed, and thus, backing up
of the metadata only should suffice.
In practice, you could compare all metadata: attributes, size, dates... if
any of them changes, backup the file (not optimal). Another method, safer,
is to also store a checksum: if some of the metadata changes (except
size), calculate the new checksum to see if a backup is needed. For this,
the metadata of the last backup should be saved on disk.
A good backup program should do all this automatically.
- --
Cheers,
Carlos E. R.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76
iD8DBQFGL0QytTMYHG2NR9URAsAgAKCFCFfahmEw/JD9XavxxwAGOHOLngCfW0XW
f2MpqVayQBuPcka+pA2NRNw=
=+YNg
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
