Carlos E. R. wrote:
The Wednesday 2007-04-25 at 11:44 +0100, G.T.Smith wrote:
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The conclusion I am coming too is the the current time stamping mechanism is inadequate for anything but the crudest of time related file management, and possibly not even that given the way some things manage files... .... and time stamping was an option...If time stamping was reliable and consistent this could have been used to flag files to backup, it is not so it cant **sigh** I
The modification time can be used to know when to backup the data, and the change time for the metadata. Meaning, if the modification timestamp has not changed, but the change timestamp has, it should mean that the file itself it's the same but the attributes have changed, and thus, backing up of the metadata only should suffice.
In practice, you could compare all metadata: attributes, size, dates... if any of them changes, backup the file (not optimal). Another method, safer, is to also store a checksum: if some of the metadata changes (except size), calculate the new checksum to see if a backup is needed. For this, the metadata of the last backup should be saved on disk.
A good backup program should do all this automatically.
I theory good, in practice not.. well look at editor example originally quoted ... modification time does not always mean content has changed it merely means the modification time stamp has changed... it would be nice that everyone handled this time stamping issue in a well defined manner... in practice many people don't, this is not criticism this is just an observation BTW Yes a good backup program will do this ..... but the serious players would charge me more than the underlying hardware is worth! A couple of people have pointed me to some stuff on a separate sub-thread which I intend to look at.. and hopefully I can avoid having to write my own solution... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org