syncany-team team mailing list archive

[Philipp Heckel <philipp.heckel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Mark,

> I'm wrestling with the idea of using syncany to drive backups. I'd
> like to transition away from cron/rsync backup sets to a local server,
> and move to syncany pushing updates to an S3 bucket.

First of, it's important to know that Syncany is very far from being
production ready. Please wait for a stable release before actually
dumping your old solution. Things are gonna change until then - big
time :-D

> >From my meager understanding of S3, a resource can be soft-deleted if
> the client moves the resource to the Trash instead of issuing a rest
> Delete operation directly on the file. Is this something that the
> syncany-s3 plugin provides?

Syncany has its own versioning mechanism so we don't need any extra
functionality from the storage. Files are chunked in little pieces and
as long as all chunks exist on the remote storage, we can reassemble
the old files. Syncany hence does not use (and doesnt need to) any
special features of S3.

> If not, am I better off turning on S3's versioning feature
> (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#What_is_Versioning) to have a complete
> change history of deleted stuff?

S3 versioning would would only produce costs since it keeps storing
deleted files. So turining off means saving money :-)
By default, S3 versioning is turned off.

> For what it's worth, I had thought of doing home directory sync via a
> git repo, but using syncany + S3 + S3-versioning may be the killer
> replacement and let me manage fewer servers myself.

Syncany's backup functionalities are at the moment somewhat limited.
The first goal is to make a file synchronization tool (like Dropbox)
-- i.e. with live synchronization... Then, when that works, we can
implement an on-demand sync mechanism (= backup).

Sorry to disappoint you, but syncing the home directory wont work,
since it must watch all directories and subdirectories... and Linux
would be unable to cope with so many watched directories.

Cheers,
Philipp