Logarithmic purge disabled/does not work

Oops - sorry, just read the change log

What will happen with purging if logarithmic was selected previous to upgrade ?

A warning is logged stating that logarithmic purging is disabled and that you should set an appropriate cutoff value in your configuration. Existing backups are not removed until you change to cutoff purge. That is, you can manually save your old backups and then enable cutoff purge.

Unfortunately, disabling the logarithmic purge was necessary since it had some serious (performance) issues. The current implementation merges existing snapshots during the purge process every time and this merge takes several hours when applied to archives containing more than 10.000 files. Practically, this makes (Not So) Simple Backup unusable for daily use. Therefore, I've decided to disable it and to provide only a working choice (the cutoff purge) for the stable release.

For later versions, it is planned to re-enable this feature.

I'll slightly modify the title of this bug and set its status to confirmed, so we can use it to track the progress on this issue.

Thanks for reporting and for using (Not So) Simple Backup.
Best, Jean-Peer.

I've just started testing 0.3. Good news is that it works, and
(finally!!) accepts an ssh destination without password.

Bad news is that for me logarithmic purging is an absolutely essential
feature. I want to be able to go back to (old!) versions of files for
some considerable period of time.

I think dropping log purging due to an implementation crash with
(incremental) snapshot merging is not a good decision. For one thing,
you could retain log purging for the full snapshots, as no merging would
be required there. Then, simply, retain all incremental snapshots until
their base full snapshot is scheduled for purging.

I'd be happy to take some of this work on me (I'm on the sbackup
developer team, but not yet on the nssbackup team, at least according to
launchpad). But I do need one of you to get me started, and give me some
pointers on where to start looking and working.

(P.S., I could not bzr the nssbackup source. Is that due to launchpad
being in read-only?)

--
Groetjes,

Anton
  _____________ _______________________________________________________
| | |
| _ _ ___,| K. Anton Feenstra |
| / \ / \'| | | IBIVU/Bioinformatics - Free University Amsterdam |
|( | )| | | De Boelelaan 1083A - 1081 HV Amsterdam - Netherlands |
| \_/ \_/ | | | Tel +31 20 59 87783 - Fax +31 20 59 87653 - Room P136 |
| | <email address hidden> - www.few.vu.nl/~feenstra/ |
| | "Got Coffee, Got Donuts, Got Wasted" (F. Black) |
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Sounds great! It would be greatly appreciated if someone was able to fix this soon. I switched back to sbackup solely for logarithmic purge, but that of course is a bit of a pain with all those backups ver. 1.5 I had.

Jean-Peer (whoops, almost wrote 'Pear' there...), after you've explained me where & how to start, could you assign this bug to me?

I agree with Anton: logarithmic purging of full backups is a key feature for the many people who'll want a selection of historical snapshots.

Fixed in latest release of Simple Backup 0.11.1: logarithmic purge is re-enabled.
Please take a look at sbackup's project site at https://launchpad.net/sbackup

Since development of nssbackup and sbackup has merged this won't fix in nssbackup. Please take a look at sbackup's project site at https://launchpad.net/sbackup