Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 17:56:50 +0200 From: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> To: Jari Kirma <kirma@cs.hut.fi> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Shadow filesystems [was Re: Pair donates 20,000 to Poul-Henning Kamp??] Message-ID: <p06002037bca5b019f2b1@[10.0.1.3]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0404161725410.24624@hutcs.cs.hut.fi> References: <Pine.GSO.4.58.0404161725410.24624@hutcs.cs.hut.fi>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 5:43 PM +0300 2004/04/16, Jari Kirma wrote:
> I played with the idea of "reliable undelete" functionality some time ago.
After a catastrophic wipeout when I was a student at the
University of Oklahoma about 20 years ago (causing me to work 36
hours straight to re-create all my hard work), I created a set of
shell script tools to replace the "rm", "mv", "cp", etc... programs
with something that would use a "~/.Trash" directory and then
compress the files, etc.... When I first created these scripts, they
were very popular, and widely used by the student community. IIRC, I
posted a fairly final version of those scripts to comp.sources.*.
ECN staff had a disagreement with me over these tools, thinking
it unwise for people to get used to the "new" behaviour, which might
lead them to get seriously screwed when they used "rm" somewhere else
and it didn't act in the way they expected. However, it wasn't until
after I had another massive wipeout (this time using vi to write a
file into the wrong filename), that I decided that I agreed with them.
So, I removed the scripts from my bin, although others could
always go to the newsgroup archives and pull down their own version
if they wanted. I don't think anyone did.
If you really want to make something like this work, you have to
cover all possible avenues of destruction, not just creat(),
unlink(), and rename routines. Introduce a real filesystem
versioning scheme, and I would gladly welcome your work.
But please don't violate POLA, and please don't help to create a
different set of user expectations that would cause users to get
seriously hurt if/when they're on another OS.
--
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/>; for more info.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p06002037bca5b019f2b1>