Handling of backup files - two new features proposed

[Michael Zimmermann]

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Dear list members,

there are two new rsync-features I made up and would like to discuss with you.

If you think these new features might be useful for the whole rsync-community,
please give me a note and I'll send you the patches (or post them here).



1.) Setting owner and/or group of backup files.

In our servers I'm using rsync to backup to a hot standby machine.
The users have access to this backup-server too, so that they
can retrieve older versions of their files. At the same time the backup
copies should not count in the user's quota (and/or should only
be deletable by root or a special group-admin).

To accomplish this, the backup files get their user and/or group set to
a special user and/or group in our local version of rsync.

Two new options control this behaviour

     --backup-owner=USER
     --backup-group=GROUP



2.) Adding a non-default suffix to backup-files in the backup-directory too

I'm not sure, wether this might be really useful but it was one of the
solutions for our backup-requirements which I was trying out.

The idea was to put the backup-directory onto another disc (with
different quotas and read-only access) and at the same time give 
the user access to more than one backup-version of his files within 
his subtree-structure. This would be done by setting --suffix to (say) 
the date and time of the backup.

The behaviour change to rsync is:

     --suffix is added to the backup-files in the backup directory too, 
     if both are given and the suffix is not equal to the default-suffix 
     (or the --suffix option is specified after the --backup-dir option).



Perhaps different environments need different solutions, hence I
propose to implement both features.

Highly interested in your comments.

Greetings
Michael
- -- 
Michael Zimmermann (Vegaa Safety and Security for Internet Services)
<zim at vegaa.de>   phone +49 89 6283 7632    hotline +49 163 823 1195
Key fingerprint = 1E47 7B99 A9D3 698D 7E35  9BB5 EF6B EEDB 696D 5811
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