Pieter Wuille wrote at about 17:57:06 +0200 on Tuesday, June 2, 2009:
 > Hello,
 > 
 > because of a need to restore files from backuppc in a more flexible way than
 > through the web-interface (a particular directory in a whole bunch of hosts
 > at the same time) and some googling, i stumbled upon Stephen Day's fuse 
 > system
 > for backuppc.
 > 
 > It had a few shortcomings, such as not supporting share-names with "/"
 > characters, and being very slow, so i started rewriting parts and adding
 > some features. 
 > 
 > If anyone's interested at trying/looking at it:
 > https://svn.ulyssis.org/repos/sipa/backuppc-fuse/backuppcfs.pl
 > 
 > Some features:
 > - caches the directory structure to improve efficiency
 > - supports chardevs and blockdevs (and files/dirs/symlinks)
 > - correct linkcounts for directories
 > - merges all shares of a host into one directory tree structure,
 >   supporting '/' and '\' as separators in sharenames
 > - open()ed filehandles are kept and reused to prevent seeking for each and
 >   every read operation - even supports efficient (sequential) reading when
 >   files are opened more than once at the same time.
 > - incremental backups are shown correctly
 > - some command-line options
 > 
 > It is only tested on one 3.1 backuppc pool on a Ubuntu 8.04 system, and not
 > very extensively. It only opens files/directories in read-only mode, thus
 > shouldn't be able to damage a working backuppc pool if something goes wrong.
 > 
 > I'd like to get some feedback; ideas, bugreports, ... are very welcome.

Just took a quick spin on it -- looks AWESOME!
In my mind this is the way to go and *much* more useful and infinitely
faster than trying to navigate the web interface. This gives me
*exactly* what I want which is rapid access to all my backup files in
a CLI format that allows me to apply common *nix utilities like 'cp', 'less'
'grep', 'diff' etc. to examine and manipulate different backup
versions.

Couple of questions/comments:
1. Is there anyway to get the root share directory to mount as '/'
   rather than as '_/"? Having root mount differently detracts a
   little from the naturalness of it all.

2. What happens when a new backup is run while the fusefs is mounted?
   Is there an easy way to get the new backup to appear automagically
   or do you need to unmount/remount?

3. What happens when a backup is expired or deleted while the fusefs
   is mounted?

4. It is definitely *much* faster than the web interface and faster
   than Stephen Day's version.

5. It might be nice to add a feature that allows you to get info on
   the backup itself - say time/day created, incremental level,
   etc. Also, it might be nice to be able to print an ascii tree of
   the backup hierarchy. I know this is not strictly speaking part of
   any fuse filesystem but it would be a nice companion CLI accessory
   since now when I start listing backups I realize that I only see
   the 'number' and don't get a good handle on the other data about
   the backup.

6. If it is too complicated to make the filesystem writable at the
   individual file level by allowing the deletion of individual files,
   an easier first step would be to allow the deletion of backups (and
   all descendants backups). This is a *much* easier problem than
   individual file deletion and only requires deleting the root
   directory trees and deleting the corresponding lines from the
   'backup' log file.

Again *nice work* -- I hope you (and others) continue to refine this
program since it is one of the most useful extensions I have seen so far!



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OpenSolaris 2009.06 is a cutting edge operating system for enterprises 
looking to deploy the next generation of Solaris that includes the latest 
innovations from Sun and the OpenSource community. Download a copy and 
enjoy capabilities such as Networking, Storage and Virtualization. 
Go to: http://p.sf.net/sfu/opensolaris-get
_______________________________________________
BackupPC-users mailing list
BackupPC-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
List:    https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users
Wiki:    http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net
Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/