[Box Backup] Unexpected bbackupctl behaviour with "sync" and "sync-and-wait"

[Achim]

Hello Chris:

On Wed, 8 Jun 2011 09:45:34 +0100 (BST), Chris Wilson <chris at qwirx.com>
wrote:
> No, sync-and-wait does a force sync. Perhaps it's misnamed, but the
> assumption is that if you're waiting for it to finish, perhaps the
> sync has a higher priority. Especially as some SyncAllowScripts might
> block indefinitely.
> 
>                 case SyncAndWaitForEnd:
>                 {
>                         // send a sync command
>                         commandName = "force-sync";

Thanks for the clarification. 

Shouldn't the command "sync-and-wait" be renamed to
"force-sync-and-wait", just to be 100% consistent and avoid confusion
for other users?

At the same time, I think that this behaviour eliminates some uses that
people might have for the sync-allow script, such as creating a
LVM/DB/VSS snapshot, since this will be skipped upon force sync.

Personally, I just moved all functionality from syncallow to the notify
script, particularly the backup-start and backup-stop sections that are
certain to be called for every backup. On a side note, other solutions
such as BackupPC or Amanda/Zmanda offer a very fine-grained access to
the different stages in the backup process:

<http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Script_API>
<http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/faq/BackupPC.html#_conf_dumppreusercmd_>

Would this be something useful for BB? Note the examples from zmanda to
create snapshots or notify the user before/after backup/restore for
specific "Backup Locations", as opposed to the current whole backup.

Best regards, Achim