nssbackup-team team mailing list archive

[Liam O'Reilly <653584@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

I started to play with sbackup as I was looking for a tool to replace my current backup system. Sbackup looks very much like the tool for the job. However when testing it, I tried to backup the directory /tmp/ with no exclusions.
I cannot run sbackup on my home directory as I use NFS and root squash was is in effect, thus I thought /tmp will change a little over time and would be a fair choice to play with sbackup over a few hours and see how well sbackup works.
After running a few backups, I noticed in the restoration system that no files were being backed up. This confused me for a while, until I found the file excludes.list in the most recent backup. This file indicates to me that the following directories are never backed up:
/sys/*
/tmp/*
/proc/*
/dev/*
<target directory of backup>
I found this a little disturbing - whilst completely understanding why these exclusions were forced. I made sure the exclude list was empty and I thought nothing was being excluded, but secretly there were exclusions. I like to fully understand my tools, especially for a job like backup. Finding that certain directories were excluded after I was told (via the GUI) that nothing was to be excluded and only /tmp was to be backed up, undermined my confidence in the tool a little. What if sbackup was doing other stuff that I didn't agree with and did not tell me and I had yet to find out or notice?
I think the tool (the GUI) should be upfront about such exclusions. 

One possible way to do this in a better way is to:
1) Have a list of default excluded directories and regular expressions etc store somewhere, maybe /etc or gconf (I think this would need to be system wide).
2) When creating a new backup profile, the GUI is populated with these default values and the user can modify them or even delete them. However, if the user deletes them then maybe there should be a message explaining why they are there in the first place. This message could also be store in point 1 alongside the particular exclusion. This way the tool is upfront, with no hidden behaviours, but the average user can use the tool with meaningful messages if the user tries to remove default exclusions. This also allows an advanced user to be able to modify settings easily. I think this covers the case of average and advanced users.

The current situation currently is misleading and as such canundermine
confidence in the tool, which is definitely something that should not
happen for a backup solution.

There may be other (possibly better) ways to address this issue.

All the best
Liam

p.s. I know this bug report contains a bit of waffle, but I think it
makes the point clear and why it undermined my confidence a little.

** Affects: sbackup
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

-- 
Implicitly excluded directories can be confuisng.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/653584
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