[Duplicity-talk] suggested feature to help Amazon Glacier users

[dcottingham00]

Here's a feature I'd like to request to help out Amazon Glacier users, that I thought I'd first post here and see if anyone has comments before I put it on launchpad. This is related to my earlier thread, since this feature would provide an easy workaround to that bug.

When using Amazon S3 with a lifecycle transition rule to Glacier, there is really no good reason for transitioning the manifests and sigtars -- they are a negligible fraction of the storage. But the way S3's rules work, and the way duplicity names the files, there is no way to do that. The rules work by a string prefix match, not a regexp match. And duplicity's different file types cannot be distinguished this way.

One way of making this possible would be to insert the file type in the filename before the timestamps. For example, one could (somewhat redundantly) insert "manifest" or "sigtar" or "difftar" right after the "duplicity".

Another approach would be to permit the user to specify one folder for difftars and another for the manifests and sigtars. This is because S3's prefix match is applied to the whole pathname relative to the bucket.

Any comments and suggestions appreciated.

 - Dave Cottingham