On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 3:06 PM, Christophe Pettus <[email protected]> wrote:
> So, an interesting problem has presented itself, and I'm not quite sure how 
> to solve it.
>
> One of the (theoretically) nice things about using WAL-E to archive to S3 is 
> that you can set up a lifecycle rule to move stuff to Glacier over time, so 
> that old backups remain available while not paying the full S3 price.  (And, 
> of course, they can be deleted entirely after a while.)
>
> This works great... except for the timeline's .history file.  Since S3 -> 
> Glacier rules are based on creation date, eventually that file will be 
> migrated to Glacier, and WAL-E restores start failing because it can't get at 
> it.  Since S3 lifecycle rules are path-prefix-based, there's no way to set a 
> different rule for that file in particular.
>
> So, some thoughts:
>
> 1. I'm misunderstanding how this work, and there's an easy way that I've 
> missed.

I don't use glacier so my expertise is not as great but I don't think
you've missed anything obvious.

> 2. WAL-E could have an option to put the .history file in a different prefix, 
> so different lifecycle rules could apply.  Feels hackish.

I have considered putting history metadata elsewhere for rapid recall
of the members of of a timeline, as prefixes aid that in S3's indexing
scheme.  Right now I have no downstream features to benefit from such
a storage-format-upgrade, but this would be one...admittedly, a bit
minor.

Another entity that should get the same treatment are the "sentinel"
(metadata) files for backups.

> 3. A different solution that I'm missing.

Maybe think a bit more, but there's some reasons to cordon off history
files into a prefix.

The thing that is most worrisome about this is how to deal with
breaking storage compatibility.  It's probably not insurmountable but
it's a bit of a thing.

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