Synchronizing xs-0.3 and xo-??? --- backups

[Michael Stone]

Martin,

Based on feedback from Peru, Mexico, and Nepal, the "restoration from
disaster-recovery backups" XO/XS coordination feature has been steadily
rising in priority. I also notice that "Backups" is your first line-item
on the XS-0.3 roadmap.

My large question is: "what changes need to be made to the XO's OS,
(currently to candidate-703) in order to make progress in this feature
cluster?"

Relevant tickets
----------------

#24       ROT    cscott      (Backup of laptops - short-term solution)
#2516     STK    tomeu       (Automatic backup of laptops to XS)
#3334     DSN    jg          (Exactly what should be backed up?)
#4569     DSN    jg          (Controlling disk usage of backups)
#4224     DSN    krstic      (Manage SN <-> "identity" mapping on XS)

#4270     PKG    wad         (Full restore from school server)
#4380     TST    tomeu       (Restore individual entry from school server)
#4275     DSN    tomeu       ("Keep" UI)
#4587     ESC    tomeu       (Mass-export Journal to USB key)

#6374     PKG    martin      (Package the xo-backup tools for the school server)
#4100     STK    krstic      (XS should provide human readable index of journal backup)

Sub-questions:

 * What backup scheme do we actually intend to deploy? (Current choices appear
   to be Wad's "dumb-rsync" method [1] and Ivan's method [2]. 

 [1]: http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/server-devel/2008-February/000314.html  (outdated)
 [2]: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XS_backup_restore

 * Does the chosen scheme permit us to sanely combine old backups with
   an XO build that makes breaking changes to file layouts?

Regards,

Michael


Key: ??? - status or author unknown
     TST - needs to be tested in a build
     BLD - needs to be put into a build
     PKG - pkg needs to be built
     DBG - debugging/diagnosis still needed
     DSN - design needed
     STK - stuck; a decision is needed about how to proceed
     SGN - a signoff is needed
     ESC - canceled or siginificantly reduced in priority
     FIN - successfully finished
     MSG - communication needed
     ROT - solution has bitrotted