lp:~bertrand-goareguer/+junk/VCB

Version Controlled Backup

On the client side :
VCB lets you backup any directory recursively (i.e. the directory and all its sub-directories) through a distributed version control tool.
Thanks to an abstraction layer, multiple distributed version control systems are supported : git, mercurial and bazaar.

A new revision is committed as soon as a file/directory is created, deleted, moved or modified.

An exception list can be provided (regular expressions are used to specify which files should not be backed-up, e.g. all files ending with the .swp extension).

This behavior may produce a lot of revision numbers. Therefore, the commit rate can be limitted (e.g. leave at least 5 minutes between 2 commits).

On the server side :
A web server makes all files (and all their revisions) available through an HTTP interface.

The server should notify all the reachable clients that a file has been updated by someone else (web sockets, XMPP, polling, other ? take into account firewalls and proxies). The client can then update its local copy of the repository.

All connections between clients and server should be established through SSL/TLS.

Clients should only backup encrypted data (check ecryptfs).