abell

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:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/02/german-reunifi...

http://fortune.com/2014/11/09/germany-east-west-economy/

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/10/daily-c...

And for Italy:

http://www.citymetric.com/business/italys-north-south-divide...

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.

Just like "The Spider", a villain in Rat-Man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-Man_%28comics%29#The_Spider It can't climb walls, but has acquired human personality traits: selfishness, greed and cruelty.

http://www.file4life.org/ - a CLI program for file backups, written in Haskell.

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.