jmtd → log → announcing RDiffFS

It gives me pleasure to announce RDiffFS, a virtual filesystem for browsing backups created by the rdiff-backup tool.

Assuming that "/backup" is the location of a series of backups created using rdiff-backup, here is a usage example:

$ rdifffs /backup/dest/ /mnt
$ ls -l /mnt
total 5
drwxr-xr-x 4 jon jon 4096 Feb  7  2010 2010-09-04T16:38:10+01:00
drwxr-xr-x 4 jon jon 4096 Feb  7  2010 2010-12-29T10:51:50Z
drwxr-xr-x 4 jon jon 4096 Feb  7  2010 2010-12-29T10:52:30Z
lr-xr-xr-x 2 jon jon   11 Jan  1  1970 current -> 2010-12-29T10:52:30Z
$ for i in /mnt/*/a; do c=$(cat "$i"); printf "%32s:\t%s\n" "$i" "$c"; done
/mnt/2010-09-04T16:38:10+01:00/a:   foo
     /mnt/2010-12-29T10:51:50Z/a:   bar
     /mnt/2010-12-29T10:52:30Z/a:   baz
                  /mnt/current/a:   baz

I will write more about the creation of rdifffs at a later date: in particular my choice of implementation language, but I don't want to clutter up this announcement with all that. Suffice to say, I started writing a "quick tool" nearly a year ago, and I have become increasingly desperate to announce it.

At present, rdifffs should be considered alpha quality software. It can browse my real-world backup, albeit slowly, and with several metadata bugs. This is more than archfs can manage. It can read files from the most recent backup, and most files from incremental backups, but not all.