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Brad Fitzpatrick

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Brackup update [Apr. 1st, 2006|11:58 pm]
Brad Fitzpatrick
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Go snag the latest copy of Brackup:

$ svn co http://code.sixapart.com/svn/brackup/trunk brackup

Notably, it now has:

-- restore support
-- the ability to preserve modes/times
-- a really nice test suite

I'll do a tag and release once the docs are updated, probably tomorrow. The Filesystem driver is fully up-to-date, but the Amazon driver is missing the restore methods.

In case I forget, the new decisions made are:

-- backups must be automatable, not requiring user input. this was already a design rule, but now it's formalized. (for instance, already had the idea of just the public key to encrypt, etc.)

-- restores may prompt for user input ("What's your Amazon S3 password?" and "Enter your GPG passphrase."), because they won't be automated or common. and I don't want a restore to require a fully setup ~/.brackup.conf. You probably lost it anyway. So a *.brackup metafile (the one you get after a backup) should contain all the metadata necessary to restore (say, Amazon S3 username), but not secret stuff.

If you try to restore from a driver that doesn't implement the "load_chunk" method you'll just get an error like, "This driver doesn't support restoring." until they're updated. (I'm thinking of the GMail target on CPAN.....)

Shout-outs to the brave people like kvance who are using this already, even before it had restore support. BTW, if you're using Amazon, add the "exist_cache = [filename]" in your [TARGET:amazon] config, so it doesn't have to do HEAD requests on every already-uploaded chunk to verify it already exists. Makes backups tons faster. Note to self: issue loud warning about non-existant existence-caches.
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Comments:
(Deleted comment)
[User Picture]From: brad
2006-04-02 06:44 pm (UTC)

Re: Net::Amazon::S3 for use with brackup

I haven't heard back from Acme. I think he's travelling. For now, use my version.
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[User Picture]From: kvance
2006-04-02 09:20 pm (UTC)
Hey, did you get my email about Brackup::Chunk->chunkref() not cleaning up after itself? (30000 new files in /tmp, etc.)?
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[User Picture]From: brad
2006-04-03 04:02 am (UTC)
Did not. Note to self: add "brackup" to my whitelist of tokens. I'll go fish out your email from my triage folder and whitelist you specifically.
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From: dan_erat
2006-04-03 01:18 am (UTC)
Just out of curiosity, how much do you trust Amazon to keep data intact and accessible? Have you read anything about how the objects are stored? I've only seen their, um, ambitious design requirements ("unlimited" scaling, 99.99% availability, "all failures must be tolerated or repaired by the system without any downtime", etc.).

I'm using S3 for backups now, which is good in that I do backups more frequently than I used to, but bad in that it's essentially a black box. I guess that I'll have to continue doing CD-RW backups on the side, which makes the whole thing seem less useful.
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[User Picture]From: brad
2006-04-03 04:02 am (UTC)
I plan to backup to both Amazon and my personal servers, and GDrive if/when it comes out.
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