[Box Backup] Competition, development, future direction?

[Charles Lecklider]

On 01/08/2012 00:13, Achim J. Latz wrote:
> ========== Ideas ==========
> Given these shortcomings and benefits, what is the possibility to create
> or finalise:
> 
> * A fully functional GUI
> Neither Boxi nor qboxbackupquery work 100%, none of them for instance
> show or can restore older versions of an existing file. Boxi still has
> an outstanding bug (from 10/2010) and only shows the *first* set of
> backup data ever uploaded [1].

Once upon a time I had a working (albeit extremely basic) MMC snap-in
for BB. Unfortunately, while I wasn't paying attention the license
changed to GPL, so I can no longer link lib/backupclient (there used to
be a dependency on lib/backupstore too, but I think recent restructuring
has removed that - I've not checked in detail yet); yes, obviously I can
start parsing the output from bbackupquery and so forth, but there are
too many problems with that approach for me to be comfortable with it.

On the 17th January 2011 I asked about getting those two libs put under
the LGPL. On the 18th Chris said:

> Does anyone have any objections to either:
> 
> 1. Relicensing lib/backupclient under a dual LGPL-BSD license, or
> 
> 2. Relicensing lib/backupclient under the BSD license (without advertising clause)? 

But I think that's as far as things went.

If you read the LICENSE file, lib/backupclient and lib/backupstore are
only GPL. I don't think they need to be BSD at all, so it's just a
matter of changing two libs from GPL to LGPL, nothing more.

I know having an MMC snap-in won't directly help the *nix side of
things, but my feeling is that allowing the UI to link to BB would allow
more flexibility which in turn may produce better results.

In any case, I can't see how the license change would hurt.

> What do you think of using a Kickstarter funding campaign [3] to see if
> there is any willingness on the list to perhaps pay for improvements to
> Box Backup? Since Chris probably won't be available, this could be
> implemented by hiring external resources, perhaps even available from
> this list?

Some of the things I had working before the license change were:

 + AD-compatible MSI installer, including upgrade
 + key generation and management util (e.g. import from unix-style key
files, export)
 + proof-of-concept sketch of key management via AD

VSS support has been on my to-do list for a long time. Chris has done a
lot of the low-level work to make that possible - much appreciated - but
there's a lot of snapshot management and error handling that needs close
attention; I've seen many upset Windows servers because some bit of
backup software didn't pay enough attention to its snapshots.

I don't object to Kickstarter per se, but I'm not sure there are enough
people using BB for it to work as intended....

-C