Hello everyone,
We are currently builiding a linux-daemon using the fanotify-API included in the linux kernel. This is a project for our university.
The fanotify-API can create events for file operations (e.g. opening, writing, etc.). So our daemon will work in the background and use this API to notice all changes made to files. Our plan is to include a communication with our daemon in rdiff-backup to test our daemon. The backup software can get the list of changed files since the last backup from our daemon and use it to make an incremented backup of the changed files. Using this we expect a speedup of the backup process, because the backup software no longer has to check all files for their time of last modification.
We have not gone through the source code of rdiff-backup yet so we don't know if we succeed with including this into the software. The daemon is close to being finished, we are currently testing it. There are some problems we have with the fanotify-API and there are some improvements to be made. Until then our daemon will have to work around these problems, but if the API is improved the way we hope, our daemon can be simplified.
My question for now is if this idea is in any way interesting for the maintainers and users of rdiff-backup. Until now we can't gurantee anything, so I just wanted to hear your opinion on the topic. I can keep you up to date concerning our work with rdiff-backup. Our plan is to start with this part of our project next week.
I know that rdiff-backup was not really maintained over the past years and the priority now is about fixing bugs and releasing a new version but we would be happy about any response we get to this project.
Greetings,
Nico