Incremental backups and batch mode.

Diego Liziero D.Liziero at exeter.ac.uk
Fri Mar 29 05:04:55 EST 2002


I'm trying to use the rsync algorithm for incremental backups.

After a quick look at rsync I saw the batch mode operations,
and I thought that maybe I can modify them for incremental backups.

What is needed is to add an option to save the checksums of all
the files of the level 0 backup and a second option to use the level n
checksum to calculate the delta batch files for the level n+1 backup.

After a deeper look into the batch mode I saw that it is
too specific to that kind of application for which it
has been written.

The contents of the *.rsync_csums files seem to be always
1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 5 ...
instead of the real checksums.

I think that the batch mode would be more useful (at least for the
incremental backup) if it worked like rdiff:
an option to save checksum, one to calculate and save the deltas
using the previous saved checksums and the current files
and one third option to read the delta files and update
the old files.

As regards the incremental backup program I would like to write,
I don't know if it is worth modifying rsync or instead starting
to write something new based on librsync.

Any suggestion?

Thanks for any help.

Diego Liziero.

(Please, cc you answer to me as I'm not subscribed to this mailing list)





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