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Re:Ask HN: What are you building? by abell on Friday September 12, 2014 @12:56PM (#8309047)
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.

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