[Linux-disciples] A backup daemon?

[Stephen R Laniel]

I'm running rdiff-backup now, and it occurs to me: programs
like inotify are kernel-level hooks for monitoring changed
files; why couldn't we use these to speed up backups? Then,
instead of running rdiff-backup once every so often, and
having it go through a processor-intensive check of every
file on my disk, it could sit in the background and
constantly monitor which files are changing. It wouldn't
monitor places like /tmp or ~/tmp or /proc or /sys, but
could monitor whatever I tell it to monitor. When a file
changes, it might do something processor-intensive like
compute a hash of the newly-changed file, or it might do
something less processor-intensive like saving the
last-changed date on the file. Then when it came time to
upload all the changed files, it could check all the files
that have been marked changed, compute rdiffs on them, and
upload those.

Does this seem like a sensible approach? Would running
inotify on all those thousands of files all the time end up
being a computational drag, in that it would markedly slow
down the user experience? It seems like it could be a useful
tool to have around, if nothing else.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key
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