-*-text-*- $Header: /CVSROOT/public/scylla-charybdis/md5backup/doc/growing_files.txt,v 1.1 2004/05/09 20:58:30 tino Exp $ Growing files support: ====================== md5backup 0.3.1 knows nothing about growing files, which is bad when you backup files like /var/log/messages. However it is easy to add this, as follows: - The format of the file store has to be changed, as the file name now must contain the file length, too. In the database we must add the file length, too. Luckily this is alpha code, so we need not to be compatible to the old format, thus this will need that the database is deleted and a full backup must be done. If we happen to hit an old format in the database, md5backup just tells this and stops. There should be a conversion script, which is easy to do, though. - If a file is not found in the database this optimization is silently skipped. So if the database was cleared (which does a full backup), no harm is done, except for that eventually some more data is written to the file store. - If a file is found in the database and the length is smaller than the actual size, then the MD5-sum must be noted for this length, too. - After the new file has been copied to the file store, another step happens if the old md5 sum matches with the MD5-sum for the length. $Log: growing_files.txt,v $ Revision 1.1 2004/05/09 20:58:30 tino idea added