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Apple's "Time Machine" Now For Linux... Sort Of
deander2 writes "Apple's 'Time Machine' is cool, but I use Linux, not MacOSX. So here is a Linux implementation (built off of rsync, of course). No fancy OpenGL, but quite functional none-the-less."
...but how is this different Dirvish, which has been around for years?
It's easier to just use rsnapshot.
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
What I'd like to see is a very simple source code control system, built on the same design. Perhaps one that would just serve the needs of a single programmer.
The essential thing is that it should look like a file system, with direct access to the project directories at any state in development... write access to the current version, read-access to previous versions... directly accessible to any piece of code via the normal file API.
There should be no need for copying files back and forth from a central repository to a working directory.
It should be equally friendly to text and binary files. It should not take much disk space to store versions of files that have not changed at all from one project version/label/whatever to the next. It is not necessary or desirable to store just the diffs between text files; in the year 2007 we really can afford the disk space to store an entire new source file even if only a few lines in it have changed.
It should not rely on some central database that can be a central point of failure if it gets corrupted.
It should reliably serve both the functions of version control and backup. Bells and whistles in version control are less important than backup. In particular, if it's on an external drive and the CPU fails, you should be able to plug that external drive into a new CPU and go on accessing it immediately.
To those who work on hundred-engineer projects that need full-bore version control and CASE tools and so forth, peace. I'm not talking about a one-size-fits-all solution. I'm talking about a lightweight, simple, minimalist tool that as far as I know doesn't really exist today.
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Under Leopard, you can wipe your disk clean, put in Leopard DVD and reboot... one of the first options would be to restore system from Time Machine backup. With this tool, what is the point of including /bin, /usr etc. in the backup if there is no system restore support in Ubuntu installer?
Actually, I have mixed feelings about having a daemon following inotify (fsevents equivalent for linux) in order to backup. My setup uses backuppc, which daily rsyncs my disk and backs it up using much the same archival solution that Time Machine uses. The rsync is non-noticeable (and, in my case occurs during working hours). An inotify daemon, on the other hand, could be responding to lots of small requests that produce null results (temp files, disk writes over the same sectors, etc).
Fine-grained backups may be interesting, but I wouldn't be interested in any kind of performance drag because of it. Daily backups have served me just fine, thanks.
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Hmm. My understanding/guess back when I first heard about it was that Time Machine was going to use the snapshotting feature of ZFS. Other Linux filesystems do have this feature. It's new and cool, but it's not ultra-new or ultra-high-tech. And yes, version control has been doing something similar for a long time.
I've seen clumsy interfaces that let you grab a backed up file from within a backup before, but never one that lets you preview - let alone do all this from within other applications.
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Because as is the case with a lot of things about windows, they don't seem to realize when they have a good thing. They wrote all the good backend code for a great feature, halfassed the UI so that the general populace wouldn't get it or want it, and then hid the entire shebang in the most expensive version of their software. Then again, there I go, thinking that maybe desktop users are MS's customers, as opposed to say - dell and hp.