Consistent backups in python

Question

I'm working on a remote backup solution in python. The server part will run on Unix/Linux because it will use hard links for efficient incremental backups.

The client part, however, will have to run on Windows too, and file locking can be a problem.

From what I've researched, Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is the thing I need. Similar to a LVM snapshot, and isn't affected by file locking. THe VSS API, however, doesn't seem to be implemented in pywin32.

My current idea is to use some wrapper that will create the a temporary VSS snapshot, run the client, and delete it afterwards.

I'm wondering if anyone has experience in this scenario.

Answer 1

Wondering about the same I stumbled upon

https://github.com/sblosser/pyshadowcopy (simple, but seems no longer active)

and

https://github.com/libyal/libvshadow (complex, ambitious, alpha)

Unfortunately I didn't have time to test them yet...