> So has anyone implemented this yet, or begun work on it or something
> similar? Thanks for any help. Please mail me directly as I am not
> subscribed to this list.
I don't know of anyone who has implemented this, although I don't
think it would be a huge amount of work. It would be excellent for
people with tape silos and I believe it would provide a backup
solution far better than the currently available systems.
> There was also work done on xdelta which uses the same algorithm as rsync
> that was doing work in this area. I haven't looked at it in a while. I think
> that it was hosted at source forge.
xdelta is indeed very good, but it isn't relevant to this sort of
backup as it requires direct access to both the old and new file to
build a diff. The big feature of a backup system I proposed is that
you don't need to read the original file back from your tape silo in
order to generate the diff that goes into the incremental. That means
you can do very fast incremental backups. It also means you don't wear
out your tapes (and tape heads etc) nearly as fast which is a very
significant cost in large tape silos. Tapes are expensive :)
Cheers, Tridge
