BackupPC-users

[BackupPC-users] Feature suggestion: more granular/flexible includes & excludes

2009-11-04 00:04:05
Subject: [BackupPC-users] Feature suggestion: more granular/flexible includes & excludes
From: "Jeffrey J. Kosowsky" <backuppc AT kosowsky DOT org>
To: General list for user discussion <backuppc-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:59:21 -0500
Currently includes & excludes are limited to lists of file or
directory names with shell globbing. At least for rsync these lists
are passed directly to the transfer routine which then does all the
work.

It would be great to be able to add conditions based on the other
basic file attributes known to BackupPC, including create/modification date,
size, permissions, file type, and perhaps also more flexible regexp
matching on the filename.

For example, I might only want to backup /tmp files less than 24 hours
old. Or maybe I only want to back up documents owned by user X. Or
maybe only want to backup executables. Or maybe I only want to back up
log files smaller than Y megabytes. Or maybe some combination of the
above conditions with and/or logic. Etc.

For includes, this would be simply implemented as an additional test
after the files has been transferred over (which would still be based
on the generic includes statement) and before it is added to the New
File list.

For excludes, you would have to allow the transfer over of all
possible candidates and only exclude them once they are transferred
over based on the additional supplied logical conditions.

The easiest way to implement this would be to allow an arbitrary perl
condition based on a fixed set of primitives. These primitives would
return the file name (full path and basename), size, mod/creation
dates, ownership, and permissions.

The idea would be to associate an (optional) potentially compound test
with each include/exclude item.

It would be a bit harder to implement a GUI interface and it probably
would be limited to a subset of all possible logical conditions. One
could think of doing something similar to how Excel allows multiple
conditions for conditional formatting.

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