Re: [rdiff-backup-users] [PATCH] Sparse file support

[Dominic Raferd]

On 03/01/2011 20:27, Eric Wheeler wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 08:11:00PM -0800, Eric Wheeler wrote:
> > > Feedback and comments are appreciated!
> ----Original Message-----
> From: Matthew Miller>
> > How will this interact with existing backups?
> rdiff-backup re-writes changed destination files, so if a source file
> changes, rdiff-backup will write the whole file after calculating a
> reverse-diff for the increment tree.
>
> Existing backup trees will become sparse over time, as files change.
>
> -Eric
So I guess it is forward-compatible, but not backward-compatible? 
Existing repositories can be read fine with rdiff-backup patched for 
sparse file support, but repositories created with sparse file support 
cannot be read by unpatched rdiff-backup. That's okay, but it might make 
most of us feel that we would rather not use this patch unless we 
specifically need it, until it is part of mainstream rdiff-backup.

Sadly, development of rdiff-backup has gone silent for a while now. I 
think these patches are great (as were Daniel Miller's a while ago, 
which provided a --verify-full option) but no one from the development 
side seems to be updating the code at the moment. (I would love to be 
proved wrong.)

- Dominic