[Box Backup-dev] Hello all - win32 client

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Nick,

> Sorry Chris, I am with Gary, the Microsoft devel environment (I use
> 2003) its toolset is pretty good for debugging, I can't comment on the
> inteli-sense in 2005 but I work on 2003.

Sorry Nick, I am with GCC, because I can distribute the resulting 
binaries. If I developed with Visual Studio and then distributed untested 
MinGW binaries, what would happen? :-)

> Also in my humble view, Microsoft wrote the compiler, libraries and OS,
> so will they not work better together?

But they did not write Box Backup, so perhaps they will not work well 
together? ;-)

Box has always been developed (on other platforms) using gcc.

> In fact I would go as far to say that in my days as an embedded software
> engineer, we always wrote for Microsoft ide, then port to the platform
> which would have much faster development cycles!

> 1. Large file support - verify it is all working

It definitely is not. The POSIX APIs used by Box on Windows do not support 
files over 2 GB, because they don't have a 64-bit file offset.

The problem, unfortunately, is to replace ALL the POSIX APIs with emulated 
replacements using the Windows APi. That will not be easy.

> 3. Look at the possibility of Shadow Copy, it looks quite tricky so no
> promises! But this looks much needed for the likes of backing up
> Exchange

This will be the first major problem for MinGW - the VSS API is cl

> The problem without shadow copy and trying to backup exchange (or
> similar - point 3 shadow copy) is you have to back an intermediary file
> using ntbackup - or just pulling out the database with exchange
> shutdown, but the problem with this is the id of the file changes so I
> believe box treats it as a new file so doesn't even try to diff??

Box will try to diff if a file is replaced by another with the same name, 
as well as the contents of a file changing. As far as I know, the ID is 
only used to track renamed files.

Cheers, Chris.
-- 
_ ___ __     _
  / __/ / ,__(_)_  | Chris Wilson <0000 at qwirx.com> - Cambs UK |
/ (_/ ,\/ _/ /_ \ | Security/C/C++/Java/Perl/SQL/HTML Developer |
\ _/_/_/_//_/___/ | We are GNU-free your mind-and your software |