I had been thinking of writing code to implement a robust fuse
filesystem for BackupPC backups but then I saw that John Craig (and
perhaps others) had started to write code.

While the code still seems to be at the proof-of-concept I think the idea
is very powerful and extensible.

The obvious extensions include:
- Using recursion and more of the View code to "fill" in incrementals
  so that each backup gives a faithful recreation of the share
  (at lease on the version I downloaded only the directories and the
  incrementally backed up files show up on an incremental)

- Using more robust concept of ownership
  For example, on a host-by-host basis, it would be great to be able
  to choose & configure among at least the 3 classes of mappings:
  - Map to ownership (passwd & group) names on the current machine
  - Map individual users/groups to specified alternative user names &
        groups on the current machine (using a mapping file per host)
  - Map generically to user=x, group=y and perms=.... (similar to what
        mount was) (using a generic map for all hosts)

- Allow creation/deletion of files
  - My program BackupPC_deleteFile could easily be adapted to allow
    file deletion from a single backup while preserving the view from
        higher level incremental backups
  - A similar logic could be followed to allow creation/addition of files (or
    moving/copying of files) within a single backup without changing
    higher level incremental backups

- Fully implementing all the content of the attrib files (not clear if
  this is done or not

- Handling of symlinks - this shouldn't be too hard
  Only new concept would perhaps be creating a map to allow for
  symlinks across shares

- Handling of hard-links - this is a *hard* problem since you would
  essentially need to scan the entire backup tree to even just
  calculate nlinks, but you could at least fake it by setting nlinks
  to n=2 (or something) if file is of type hard link (either source or
  target)

- Code optimization? caching? e.g., cache recently looked up
  directories & files

- Other cool??? stuff...
  - Adding an extended attribute to retrieve the file md4sum

In any case, I think a robust fuse filesystem is an excellent way of
solving the following:
1. Allowing easy comparison/verification of backups (or more likely
  parts thereof)
2. Simplifying ability to find and restore files using standard *nix
  routines for finding, grepping, copying, etc file (along with the
  ability to write scripts to automate and repeat) versus having to
  use a clunky web interface
3. Allowing more granular permissions over who can read/restore
  what. Basically you can use regular *nix file permissions and groups
  either as inherited from the files themselves or as set in
  policy/mapping files as suggested above

I really almost *drool* over having the ability to use simple commands
like find/grep/diff to find some old file that was deleted or some
older version of a file that has a key change I need.
Imagine being able to say:
        find <host>/[20-30]/<partial path> -exec grep <lost keyword> {} \;


In any case, I was wondering whether anyone is actively working on
this and if so what is the roadmap. I am willing to help and
contribute but probably don't have the bandwidth (or knowledge) to do
this all myself.

Which gets me back to the #1 thing that is gnawing me (in a positive
way) about BackupPC -- which is that it *seems* to be lacking an active
development engine. There is so much exciting stuff to be done but I
have yet to figure out how to tap into a group that is active in
taking this to the next level.

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