real time file monitoring

[Rahul Sundaram]

Deja-dup currently does a scan of the configured backup folders and this can take a quite bit of time before the diff syncing even starts. It would be useful to have a agent running in the background that does real time monitoring of file changes, logs it and when Deja-dup is started, play the log instead of doing a full scan at the time of the launch. Would make Deja-dup significant faster to sync changes on subsequent runs. Perhaps you can hook into Zeitgeist if it has this info already.

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

Actually, that first scan is just to determine total file size of everything duplicity will touch. We run duplicity in 'dry-run' mode and let it tell us the size of all included files. But really, we could probably tell that easily enough ourselves without asking duplicity.

That would be a good improvement to skip the lengthy dry run. It might be as simple as running du on the directories.

[Michael Rodríguez-Torrent (mrtorrent)]

Just wanted to say that, after running so many backups recently to test out that other bug and finding that the initial scan itself takes quite a few hours on my data, I can really see the utility of a proactive notification system like this. I believe Apple's Time Machine works in a similar fashion, by monitoring changed files.

Doesn't dbus (or some other Gnome component) provide notification hooks for filesystem changes? If I'm not mistaken, I think a few media management applications, e.g. Banshee, use this to keep their libraries up-to-date.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

This would probably be easiest to implement after Bug #1415621