Re: [rdiff-backup-users] Activity

[Wojciech Stryjewski]

> I also would like to use it in larger scale, as it is - to  the best of my
> knowledge - the only free and flexible 4D-Backup-solution. However, I

If you don't mind using a free but non open source program, then there
is www.crashplan.com. Although their business model is providing
online space for backup storage, I believe you can still use their
backup application for free to do backups between your own machines.
And their software works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Sun.

> * The repository format. When recovering older files, rdiff-backup
> really needs every single reverse delta, which is not only slow, but
> also extremely fragile (if only one of those files is corrupted,
> recovery will fail). A solution might be some additional,
> larger-granularity reverse deltas that help speeding up recovery as well
> as preserving integrity of "most of the timeline" even if some deltas
> are corrupted.

Git solves this problem with a pack.depth config option with a default
value of 50. Once the max delta depth is reached, the next version of
the file would be a separate copy.

One new feature I would personally like to see is a push/pull between
repositories that can move all or some snapshots in a network and disk
space efficient manner (e.g. without having to temporarily restore all
the data just to compute a different set of deltas for the 2nd
repository).