After being partially dissatisfied with various existing solutions, I have written my own backup software: file4life (http://www.file4life.org). I've been using it for the last 3 years and am currently working on a new release.
Its main advantages with respect to other approaches, at least for my use cases, are:
- metadata is stored in a single append-only file: no extra software (DB etc.) is needed;
- partial backups can be performed to separate storages. In fact, source and backup directories are not conceptually different, so a duplicate of a directory counts as a backup.
For the German reunification, I read a quite interesting essay by Vladimiro Giacché: "Anschluss. L'annessione. L'unificazione della Germania e il futuro dell'Europa" (also available in German).
A few potentially interesting links after a quick googling:
How long term should the view be? In Italy, political and monetary union hasn't led to anything approaching parity between North and South after 150 years. And as far as I understand, the outcome of German reunification is still quite disappointing for East Germans after 25 years.
I'm quite skeptical of a European political unification having a net benefit, considering precedents. To mention European cases, East Germany is still far from catching up with the western part (you might be aware of this as a Pole) and the South of Italy, which in the mid 1800s was quite advanced, has never really recovered after being "united" with the North. And we are speaking of regions with a common language.
To make things worse, the linguistic and cultural composition of Europe is much more diversified.
This means a much higher friction for internal migrations, which would help balance economic mismatches. Moving say from Italy to Poland or from Greece to Germany to work requires a huge investment in language acquisition.
Another effect of language barriers is the difficulty of a paneuropean political discourse. In this respect, I am quite grateful to Varoufakis for communicating extensively in English and allowing me to access his and Syriza's message (whether I agree with it or not) out of the simplifications and potential distortions of my country's media.
After trying a few existing solutions over the years, I decided to build my own to keep track of the various copies of emails, pictures etc. that are spread across my computers and external drives.
The approach is:
- append information to a single metadata file, recording where a file was seen, what priority it was given etc.
- when starting, load all the information, building efficient in-memory data structures
- allow backups into any dir in a transparent format
It avoids the need of a dedicated server, treats existing copies of a file as de facto backups and is suitable for heterogeneous storages.
I have only compiled and tested it for Linux (Debian wheezy, AMD64), but it should build on other POSIX systems which have the Haskell platform installed. It's currently in beta and I have a long TO-DO list, but I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's been doing its job keeping track of over 200k unique files.
Feedback would be really welcome. I set up no issue-tracking interface yet, but you can contact me at the email address reported on the website and I'll be happy to help.
Its main advantages with respect to other approaches, at least for my use cases, are:
- metadata is stored in a single append-only file: no extra software (DB etc.) is needed;
- partial backups can be performed to separate storages. In fact, source and backup directories are not conceptually different, so a duplicate of a directory counts as a backup.