Re: Managing Outlook pst files

"Ryan Jacobs" writes:

> Hello. I have a question related to how backuppc manages locked .pst files.
> I have been up and down the list archives, and have even posted a similar
> question to this list (w/o reply), and I still can't seem to get clarity on
> a couple things. Sorry to bring up a similar question to the list again, but
> I'm not sure where else to go.
>  
> Basically, I am wanting to understand how backuppc manages locked pst files
> in the 'long-term.' I understand that locked files are simply a problem that
> backuppc cannot overcome, and I understand how the outlook e-mail warning
> feature works (and it's quite a nice add-in). What I don't know is how does
> backuppc manage the 'bad' pst files that it comes across, or the good pst
> files that are manually captured. For example, if a user receives an e-mail
> warning that their outlook files have not been backed up in xx days, and
> they manually run an incremental backup, then this backup only lasts a few
> days (until incremental backups expire). If they manually run a full backup
> instead, then this good .pst backup may get some extra mileage, but there is
> not guarantee that it makes it past the first full backup expiry period...
> and thus it does not propagate through time. This all means that if a user
> skips one of the e-mail warnings, and then needs to recover mail data, it is
> unlikely that they will find ANY useful old mail backups... even though
> there are plenty of backups for their pc dating back many weeks, and even
> though they DID remember to do a manual backup a couple e-mail warnings ago.
>  
> I also saw somewhere that backuppc attempts to 'link' bad .pst files with
> previous good copies in the pool. However, I cannot find any indication that
> this is happening with my setup (Debian package version:  2.1.0pl1)
>  
> So I am simply wondering how one can assure that the "good" captures/backups
> of problematic .pst files propagate through the backup storage so there is
> always (at least) an old .pst backup which is useful.

If a pst file is bad (noted by parsing the output of smbclient
or rsync) it is removed.  Older backups are scanned (using the
same relative path) and if any file of the same name is found
it is assumed good and a hardlink is created pointing to that
same file.

So that way the older good pst file is effectively "copied"
(hardlinked) into the most recent backup.  It will survive
expiry of the older backup.  This way the most recent good
pst file should always be propagated forward.

That said, this feature is a little fragile since it depends
upon the formatting (and correct parsing) of the output from
smbclient or rsync.  Since rsync on cygwin/WinXX seems to print
additional prefixes (eg: cygdrive/...) to the file paths in its
output messages, I suspect this pst feature might be broken with
rsync.

Craig


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