Use the OS Shadow functions where avalible about duplicati HOT 24 CLOSED

From [email protected] on March 13, 2009 06:57:49

This looks like a critical feature, as it impacts in the backup integrity. I would
five it a "High" priority.

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From [email protected] on March 13, 2009 08:27:04

It usually only affects databases. I would say that this is an enterprise feature,
and it certainly would require some elevated privileges to activate.

For regular home-users I think this non-critical.

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From [email protected] on March 13, 2009 08:37:23

Labels: -Priority-Medium Priority-Low

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From [email protected] on March 13, 2009 08:48:43

Well... don't know how all this work when I have Outlook opened over my 200MB data
file and its backup is running on background. It's worth to check it, because that's
definitely a regular home users case.

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From [email protected] on March 14, 2009 04:27:51

You are correct. I had not considered Outlook's database, but that is likely to cause
trouble if you get a half-written version of that file.

It will be a pretty heavy time investment from my side to get this feature ready,
which is why I have marked it with low-priority.

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From [email protected] on April 22, 2009 19:00:30

Have you looked into http://alphavss.codeplex.com/? Might make implementing this (on
Windows) a bit easier.

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From [email protected] on April 22, 2009 23:26:09

Wow, that looks cool. I had not seen that before, but it seems to fit the bill
exactly. Thank you for the link!

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From [email protected] on June 01, 2009 23:12:42

The freeware tool Hot Copy ( http://www.r1soft.com/tools/linux-hot-copy/ ) from R1Soft
might be a good candidate for supporting this feature on Linux.

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From [email protected] on March 05, 2010 23:14:50

This is definitely needed. Many files, including outlook are not backed up when
duplicati is ran. I keep my pc running 24/7 and so do many people and i rarely close
outlook and my most used programs. Its not good that duplicati doesnt backup items
that are used the most. =P

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From [email protected] on March 06, 2010 05:53:18

Ok, this seems to be the "most requested feature", so I will try to get it into 1.2.

Labels: -Priority-Low Priority-Medium Milestone-Release1.2

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From [email protected] on March 21, 2010 09:27:24

I think this is very important, currently Duplicati command line can't copy an open
word document, which it could if using a shadow copy

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From [email protected] on April 24, 2010 07:03:35

Found this C++ implementation http://tranxcoder.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/using-volume-shadow-services-to-copy-locked-files/ Hope it helps.

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From [email protected] on July 22, 2010 01:24:09

I have some of this working on a local test.
It is really cool actually, as it asks any VSS aware programs to save their data before doing the shadow copy. That should mean that any database, and particularly Outlook, will work correctly.

The drawback is that it requires Administrative privileges to create the shadow copy, and uses native os-version specific dll's.

Status: Started

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From [email protected] on July 22, 2010 08:23:43

That's great news!

Once issue 9 is implemented it will resolve the administrator privileges problem.

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From [email protected] on July 23, 2010 17:08:40

Hi, here's an interesting method to working with open files
without the use of VSS (just in case): https://spideroak.com/faq/does_spideroak_backup_open_files

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From [email protected] on July 24, 2010 02:49:33

Yes, I'm not sure of the details, but I think there is a function in Windows that allows you to access a file's content without regards to permissions. I would think that would require administrator privileges as well.

It may work well for simple applications that just write data when required, but more sophisticated software will attempt to only write to disk when absolutely necessary, meaning that the file on disk, even if readable, may be broken. If such a file was backed up, it would be completely useless. I'm guessing that is what they call "exponential back-off". While their scheme may work for the majority of situations, I doubt it works well with Outlook and databases.

On a system where VSS is not available, it may be a preferred alternative.

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From [email protected] on August 12, 2010 13:08:58

I have now put up r465 on the download page, which supports disk snapshots, using VSS on windows and LVM on linux.

It can be activated by setting the "snapshot-policy" option either on the commandline or on the GUI advanced page. The current default is "off", once I get some feedback on the stability of this feature, I will change that to "auto".

For windows, the shadow copy service must be started, and the program must run with administrative privileges.

For linux, the system must use LVM and have some free blocks in the VG, and the user must have rights to run the lvm tools (usually only root can do this). Also, the files in the "lvm-scripts" folder must be marked executable.

I have created issue #245 to track development of a .deb file that removes the burden of setting the executable bit.

I have created issue #246 to track the non-vss open method mentioned by kodak55555, and I have implemented the "open file backup read" method for windows, but not enabled it, due to the reasons stated in issue #246 .

I appreciate any feedback on this issue.

Status: Fixed

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From [email protected] on August 15, 2010 07:35:24

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From [email protected] on August 15, 2010 07:35:24

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From [email protected] on August 15, 2010 08:46:22

I can reproduce that.
You need to enter a value for the "snapshot-policy" setting.
You can choose between: auto, on, required, off.
If you enter some text in the "value" field, the exception does not appear for me.

I have committed some validation in r472 , that both fixes the exception that you've reported, but also warns if the value entered is not correct.

The "auto" setting will attempt to activate VSS and fail silently. The "on" option will do as the "auto" setting, but write a warning in the log if VSS fails to activate. The "required" setting makes Duplicati abort the run if VSS fails. The "off" options completely disables VSS and does not attempt to activate it.

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From [email protected] on August 15, 2010 09:50:41

Thank you kenneth, I didn't realize that the "value" field was writable in r465 .
I entered "on", and the exception did NOT appear.

I'll report back if anything strange happens when the scheduled backup runs.

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From [email protected] on August 17, 2010 11:39:27

snapshot-policy + VSS is working nicely in Windows 7 (64bit).

I did run into permissions problems, as expected. Duplicati.exe will not auto-start when you change its properties to "run as admin". However, I did find a work-around that seems to be effective:

(1) Remove duplicati.exe from the Windows start-up folder.
(2) Create a new task in Windows Task Scheduler to run duplicati.exe when you login to your account. (check: "run with highest privileges").

I'm looking forward to version 2.0 and duplicati as a Service. That might be the ideal time to change the default setting for snapshot-policy to either "auto" or "on".

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From [email protected] on September 14, 2010 10:12:17

Issue 266 has been merged into this issue.

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From [email protected] on February 07, 2011 09:33:02

Issue 365 has been merged into this issue.

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