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Author Topic: making filetool.sh work with other archival tools  (Read 2882 times)

Offline yiyus

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making filetool.sh work with other archival tools
« on: October 06, 2015, 05:59:15 AM »
(Please, let me know if there is other board better for this topic, I was looking for a "development" board or something like that, but this is the closest I found).

I will assume you are familiar with the filetool.sh script and how it handles permanent storage in tinycore [1].

During the last months, I have been using tinycore with a custom filetool.sh which, instead of tar and gzip, uses zpaq to store the data. zpaq [2] is an incremental backup tool which deduplicates the data before compressing it. It is a journaling archiver, so it allows you not only to keep your data, but also to keep snapshots at different points in time, which I find extremely useful. (I have already submitted a zpaq extension which I hope will arrive at the official repos soon).

I am also working in some plan9port [3] packages (I will talk about this in more detail in another message in the extensions board). One of the tools included in plan9port is venti [4], which also allows to perform incremental backups. I would like to have the possibility of using venti to store my tinycore backups too.

So, I propose to modify filetool.sh and the tools that use it in such a way that the archival system to use becomes an option. I think I will be able to do it without complicating things too much. The configuration for the user will be straightforward (just load the package you want to use) and all the changes will be backward compatible, so it will not affect at all people who just want to continue using their mydata.tgz files.

At this point, I just want to know if there is any interest in these changes and if there is any other backup tool people may want to use in addition to tgz, zpaq and venti. If there is no opposition, I will investigate a bit more and will send a more detailed proposal.

Thanks for reading!


[1] http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:backup
[2] http://mattmahoney.net/dc/zpaq.html
[3] https://swtch.com/plan9port/
[4] https://swtch.com/plan9port/man/man1/vac.html

Offline curaga

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Re: making filetool.sh work with other archival tools
« Reply #1 on: October 06, 2015, 06:01:15 AM »
Sure, such patches are welcome.
The only barriers that can stop you are the ones you create yourself.

Offline hiro

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Re: making filetool.sh work with other archival tools
« Reply #2 on: October 06, 2015, 05:37:59 PM »
I'm definitely curious what you come up with :)