Going about beta-testing a program... advice?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 10:05:49AM -0400, Madison Kelly wrote:
>   There is a switch for rsync that tells it to do delta copies on local 
> file systems. What you say though is quite valid and I will need to run 
> performance tests later to see which is actually more efficient. I 
> enabled the switch by default (you can tweak how rsync runs in the 
> config file) thinking about some files that where several gigs in size.

Well unless the file change is only a replacement of contents (no insert
or delete in length) you could update just the changed part, although
you still have to read both files to find the changes, which will cause
twice the reading, and still some writing.  In case of inserts/deletes,
at least the file part after the first change has to be completely
rewritten, so it should still cause extra work on top of a simple copy.

> >Does it backup all relevant attributes of the files?  Extended
> >atributers (filesystem specific)?  ACL?
> 
> I haven't recorded ACL (to make sure I understand, you are talking about 
> MS NTFS extended data, right?) however now that you mentioned that I can 
> get that info using 'getfact -R' I should be able to add that easily 
> enough. Making sure that I get everything relevant will be part of the 
> beta-testing process. At this point I record owner, group, permissions, 
> last modified date and time, size, etc...

No ACL as in posix ACL.  Quite useful for finer grain control than one
owner and one group per file.  Also makes samba way nicer to work with
since you can control access per file/dir rather than per share.

>   Thanks for your input! I am finding it a lot harder to get help and 
> feedback then I expected. I suppose I should have expected that given my 
> boss' desire for a non-GPL license. I had hope making it free to home 
> users was enough though I have to admit if I was on the other side of 
> this I may well feel the same as others here seem to feel. Alas...

I think too many people just don't do backups, or they do them ad-hoc
by backing up a chunk of files when they think of it.

Lennart Sorensen
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