We are modifying files and folders direcly on the file server. With this practice there is a risk that changes in our folder structure, such as renaming, moving or deleting folders have undesired effects. For example, a link to a folder will be broken once the folder has been renamed. Or a script will not work any more because an input file or folder has been renamed or moved. Therefore, it is important to know what changes have been made to files and folders on the server.
It would be possible to let the operating system track such changes. However, this would slow down the server so much that this is not an option.
We propose the following “hand-made” and simple solution to track changes: Once per day (preferably during the night) we run a script. This script gets a full list of files and folders that are currently stored on the server. This list does not only contain the paths to the files and folders but also additional information such as file sizes, times of last access and owners of the files. All these information are written to a text file.
These text files allow to
quickly search for a file or folder by just searching the text file. Even though these files have a size of about 50 Megabytes, searching these files using a good text editor is much more efficient than searching the whole file server.
compare text files referring to different days. Using the tools provided by professional version control software can support the comparison.
This package contains a set of functions that aim at supporting the approach described above.
read_paths(): Read paths from a text file that contains
exactly one path per line.write_paths_to_folder_tree(): Create a folder
structure up to a certain folder depth in a given target directory. The
folder structure is defined by a vector of paths. The idea of this
function is to restore an old folder structure of which the paths have
been saved. When two folder structures are restored from two path
vectors that represent an original folder structrue at two different
points in time, version control software can be used to compare these
folder structures. In Tortoise SVN, for example, changes are marked with
a red exclamation mark.
build_folders_from_file(): Restore a folder
structure of which the paths were stored in a text file. This function
first reads a vector of paths from a text file and then calls
write_paths_to_folder_tree() to restore the so defined
folder structure.