snapshots?

snapshots?

Posted Jan 30, 2006 2:55 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: snapshots? by drag
Parent article: MD / DM

Well, for what it's worth time-based expiry was designed into Recant from the start. Yes, the algorithm is rather fiddly and expensive; definitely a job to be done by a background thread in times of disk idleness only.

Log-structured filesystems are one of those things that seem terribly neat at the start --- Recant was originally going to be a log-structured FS --- but I spent some time trying to figure out a way to expire them without doing a massive pass over the entire disk and vast memory consumption and never thought of a way. Hence I'm trying something implemented completely differently.

You also can't go back in time on any scale smaller than the entire filesystem with a log-structured FS, which makes it all of marginal use. Recant lets you go backwards on a file-by-file and tree-by-tree basis (with obvious oddities if you have some files in that tree hardlinked to places outside that tree).

However log-structured filesystems are very *efficient* at both reading and writing, fragmentation excepted, and require essentially no maintenance --- until they fill up. But when they fill up, you're in real trouble.

(Now if my hardware would just stop failing I might be able to get some more work done on it. One dead motherboard, one dead network card and one dead disk this weekend alone. *sigh*)

--- oh, and doing complete backups of any filesystem with historical state is a bit of a sod, too. I have some ideas on that point, and oddly after this weekend's disk failures the backup stuff has suddenly started mattering a lot more to me...

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