[rdiff-backup-users] Fatal Error: Mirror metadata not found - answer

[viczh]

Hi,

my name is Victor Joukov and I started porting rdiff-backup to native Windows 
Python, no Cygwin etc.

I found that rdiff-backup is written mainly to Unix API, and relies on stuff 
that even when present in Python/Windows, usually

not implemented (many fields of stat structure are zero or bogus)

Up to now, I managed to make a local backup by modifying release 0.13.4. It 
lacks any permission/ACL/user/group stuff,

despite Windows has almost all of these structures. When trying to compare 
backup and original, I faced with the same problem

David Kempe did in February - I got misterious message - see subject. I believe 
the answer is in incorrect code in metadata.py, line 407.

When you try to find an appropriate point in time it is pointless to try to 
find EXACT match, you should be extremely lucky ;-)

So if you change == into <= in the mentioned line, so that it reads

if rp.getinctime() <= time:

    cls._rp = rp

    ...

etc. it will work. I though need somebody to verify my hypothesis - I am new to 
the code, and it is not too small to figure out for sure.



I have couple notes about other parts of the system in regard to

Windows. First, to treat Windows filesystem as just case insensitive

and escape every uppercase letter leads to complete visual garbage

in backup directory if your original files had uppercases. We'd

better check for name clashes on backup system, because Windows

filesystem preserves the case. Second, why to use such long, unnesessarily 
detailed (timezone?) and Windows unfriendly timestamp?

It contains several colons AND uppercase T which is escaped!

Can we just translate into UTC and use something like

current_mirror.20040319082117.data

which is MUCH MORE readable than what is ACTUALLY produced on my

computer:

current_mirror.2004-03-19;08402;05821;05817-06;05800.data

It definitely should read old escaped format (or unescaped - depends

on your platform) for compatibility.



So, I am now trying to solve uid/gid/chown/inode and all other Unix

stuff. It all should work eventually on NTFS at least.



Hope this helps,

sorry for long post,

Victor.



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