pfirsich / frontdown Goto Github PK

At the moment Frontdown will create a new folder every time a new backup is started, without ever removing old ones. There should be an option to delete older backups automatically and also a mechanism that deletes old backups if necessary. At the moment Frontdown will just fail when trying to backup to a full drive, so there should probably an estimation step when applying actions that will check if there is enough space left to actually apply the changes and delete old backups if necessary.

I'm really leaning towards GPL on this one, because I don't want anyone to improve the backup tool that is supposed to finally fulfill my needs without making it available to me.

One of the requirements when first starting Frontdown was to have it handle opened/locked files, which is does not do yet.

We could cache file sizes, modification dates and/or hashes for files in a backup.
The cache could be implemented in JSON or for performance as binary.

It seems as though some messages (for example in line 23: "logging.info("Apply actions.")" show up in neither the console nor the log file. And exceptions/errors only show up in the log.txt and not in the console.

Probably we want to pre-render the HTML table instead of parsing the JSON content.
Maybe we can also hide the "hardlink" entries (in hardlink mode) since they basically are NOP.

Currently added files in the target is O(n^2). We would have to optimize finding specific files in the fileSet, but the order of our list should be preserved (so it resembles the structure of the file system as a breadth search linearization), so I would suggest using an auxiliary structure. Maybe just a dictionary?

    for fullName in relativeFileWalk(compareDirectory):
        for element in fileSet:
            if element.path == fullName:
                element.target = True
                break
        else:
            fileSet.append(File(fullName, source=False, target=True))

• Outline the different modes and how they work
• create a reference config, that includes every key and comments on the key and the respective functionality.
• Motivate the creation of this tool.
• List dependencies and contributors

Currently, the metadata flag is set to true every time the actions are applied (without checking the result).

metadataDirectory mostly is config.TARGET_DIR + backupDateFolder or in non-versioned mode only config.TARGET_DIR, targetDirectory is not config.TARGET_DIR and element.target does not denote existence in the target, but in the compare directory. Proper terminology for the folder that holds all the sub-backup-folders (named by date), these folders themselves and the folder inside them holding the actual backup data has to be found, that also maps naturally to non-versioned backups.

I think we should implement automatic integration tests, that are predefined configs with predefined file system setups and predefined modifications of these systems between the backup. This might be quite a bit of work, but if someone other than ourselves ever starts to use this tool, we should definitely employ comprehensive tests of some sort.

The current version (importing a module) does not allow for default values. Using eval() and a globals dict, this would be possible. There are probably more options though...

Calling JSON_minify reduces the whole JSON code to one line and therefore makes the error messages the json modules throws very unhelpful regarding the location of the parsing problems.

Currently, Frontdown has no concept of folders, so that empty folders will not be included in the backup. This was a deliberate design decision, but turns out to be necessary...