On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:41:52 -0400, Havoc Pennington <hp@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > So the "Copy of Inspiron" is a read-only backup of your Inspiron homedir > (kept on some network share). The other icons are the actual homedirs on > those systems. If you imagine I now connect the Inspiron, my Optiplex > desktop changes in real time: Yes that's right.. im going to beat the dead horse. "Copy of whatever" sure sounds like a mirror to me... did you know that rdiff-backup can produce a full "up2date" mirror of the incrementally backuped directory, plus a hidden directory tree to store the incremental differences. The UI you describe sounds very much like a slick way to connect to a read-only network shared rdiff-backup'd home directory to me. Now of course.. i dont have skill to make the UI slickness you describe work. But what if... I came up with a stupid hacky way to produce that sort of switching idea using a network mountable share of an rdiff-backup'd directory. A stupid little cronjob to detect if the real read-write mountpoint of interest unmounts, and then mounts the read-only rdiffbackup mountpoint from elsewhere on the network. And i created a dumb...very very very dumb automated rdiffbackup script that would attempt to keep the backup synced with the real mountpoint when it was active on something like a reasonable sync timescale once an hour or less. Would that interest you as a lead in into something more sophisticated? -jef"i think the dead horse likes it"spaleta
