[Pybackpack] pybackpack thoughts and future

[Jeff Spaleta]

On 8/27/07, Andrew Price <andy at andrewprice.me.uk> wrote:
> - How to keep the data safe in case your drive is lost/stolen
>   (This could be a job for an encrypted backup backend like duplicity
>    which Seth suggested earlier)

security is a parallel problem that needs to be figured out for
rdiff-backup in general and not usb specific. Personally I plan to use
a local encrypted filesystem mounted through fuse and then
rdiff-backup the underlying encrypted files, when I have to worry
about security. I have usb cases in mind where I don't really care
about security. For example students doing RedHatHigh project work.

> - Could anyone come along and insert their usb drive into your computer
>   to snaffle your files?
>   (Again duplicity might help with this but is there a better solution?)

> Also, I'm not sure if a pybackpack daemon waiting around in the
> background for events is an idea I'm comfortable with. In my head,
> things like that should be kicked off by the desktop environment where
> conflicts can be easier avoided (e.g. GNOME already offers configurable
> actions for when CDs/DVDs/iPods are inserted but sadly not for usb drives).

Not per CD actions. Gnome-volume-manager would have to grow support
for per-volume-id memory to do this correctly, so that the pybackpack
action only happen for specific usb storage and not for others.  We'll
have to watch and see where HAL and gnome-volume-manager go.  If they
grow per-device-per-user logic then the mechanism is there.  I think
may be happening already to support things like encrypted filesystems
on usb sticks.

> I get the overall picture that different people like to back their files
> up in lots of different ways and I feel that trying to cater for all of
> them in pybackpack proper would be an act of insanity. As I discussed
> with Seth, if the abstractions in pybackpack were improved it should be
> pretty easy to write extension modules to provide these backup methods
> and extra functions. Not that I'm against having extension modules in
> the pybackpack project, I'd just like them to be distributed separately
> so that users can pick and choose and only install the functionality
> that they require. I'll likely make a place for them in svn.

I've no problem with that.  It is my not so humble opinion that the
one big missing piece of technology that casual user desktop needs is
reliable and easy to use personal data backup. It's not sexy, its not
flashy, but its a life safer.

-jef"not to mention it helps with migration across OS releases"spaleta