Re: [bu-users] Another use for BU

[Vincent S. <bu...@hi...>]

On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 07:31:34AM -0500, Tony Willoughby wrote:
> 
> Vincent Stemen wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 08:29:10AM -0500, Tony Willoughby wrote:
> >> Just thought I'd explain a new use for BU that I've found.
> >>
> >> I use it with my dropbox.com account.  Dropbox will backup all of 
> >> ~/Dropbox to the cloud.  I populate ~/Dropbox with a cron job running 
> >> rbu.  It's nice because rbu allows me to easily filter out stuff that I 
> >> don't want uploaded.
> >>
> >>
> >> -- 
> >> Tony Willoughby to...@po...
> > 
> > Hi Tony.  I assume you mean a cron job running *bu*, since rbu does not
> > have filtering yet.
> > 
> > I do something similar to keep our web hosting VPS server backed up.
> > I use bu, for the filtering, to backup to a local directory on the
> > server, then use rsync to pull the changes to a backup dir on my local
> > machine. 
> > 
> > You can also use rbu directly with services similar to dropbox if they
> > support rsync, such as rsync.net.  Unfortunately, it is going to be
> > a while longer before I can allocate time to get back on rbu to add bu's
> > include/exclude lists.  So, to have filtering for now, we are stuck with
> > using bu to a local (or NFS) directory as you are doing, and then
> > rbu'ing to the off site backup server.
> > 
> > - Vince
> 
> I'm using rbu.  Are you sure it doesn't support filtering?
> 
> I've seen a couple of cases where something is backed up when it 
> shouldn't, but overall filtering seems to work.
> 
> I'll try bu for laughs.

Well...  I thought I was sure, but it looks like you are right.
I glanced over the code again and ran a couple tests, and exclude lists
are implemented and working, using rsync's "--exclude-from" feature
(using bu's normal Exclude file).  I forgot I had already implemented
it.  Guess I have slept to many times since then.  I haven't run any
extensive tests to see how well rsync's built in filtering works though.

However, include lists are not implemented yet.  I played around with it
for a few minutes, just to see, and could not get include lists to work
the way I want with rsync.  So we are stuck with specifying the files on
the command line for now.  

When I get time to do more significant work on it, I may do my own
filtering, like I did with bu, and add the ability to use full regular
expressions in include/exclude lists rather than using rsync's simple
fnmatch() style patterns.

- Vince