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Re: TarSnap usecases



I think a GUI would be neat. But I think the only thing that would really make it useful would be the ability to have it provide a lot of detail about the files being backed up and the ability to specify a file version and have the gui request the container file from tarsnap and then extract the single file to a specified location.

Colin made the CLI to tarsnap quite usable and simple so it'd be hard to just make a GUI that made tarsnap more simple.

A GUI for tarsnap would have to really elaborate on the file versions and what is inside of each snapshot to really make it worthwhile.

Also of note is that this would primarily be for workstations or windows servers and not unix based servers. So functionality would really need to be geared towards those applications. I would consider basing your functions off of that of BackupExec from Symantec. Options like Exchange archiving and SQL backups and details on all backups.

Only feature I'd like tarsnap to add is local data stores for data backup and the ability to pull data from those before requesting it from the tarsnap server should the file be available locally.

Just my thoughts.

--
Robert Clemens

Martin Grünbaum wrote:
Hi there,

I'm contemplating writing a GUI frontend for TarSnap in Java. However, before pursuing that I'd like to get an idea on a variety of different uses, since I can only speak of my own. If anyone would be so inclined as to share with me (or the rest of us) what you're using TarSnap for, in enough detail that I can draw up proper usecases for it, that would be greatly appreciated!

To get the ball rolling, here is what I myself am using TarSnap for at the moment:

I back up University school work on a daily basis through a shell script that appropriately names the archive, such that I get archives that look like so:

20091118-200001-daily-diku
20091126-200001-daily-diku
20091110-214801-weekly-diku
20091117-200001-weekly-diku
20091122-200001-daily-diku

That is, YEARMMDD-HHMMSS-daily/weekly/monthly-archive_name

Similarly, for a workplace I back up their email and calendar folders on 15 different laptops with the same shell script, named in the same way.

Options used when creating archives are -H -v --humanize-numbers --lowmem --print-stats for decently readable logged info.

Beyond supplying usecases, if you have any thoughts on the general idea of a TarSnap GUI it would be nice to hear so that I can take it into consideration :)
Cheers,
Martin Grünbaum


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