[Info-vax] File Systems

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-05 19:26:26 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> On 3/5/15 11:35 AM, David Froble wrote:
> 
> There are plenty of good concepts out there and VSI may have some new 
> ones of its own up its sleeve. It will be no small feat to make 
> something really tuned in to the storage of today and tomorrow but also 
> backward compatible with (most of) the older interfaces and 
> applications. But the payoff could be significant. Maybe we can replace 
> BACKUP/IGNORE=INTERLOCK with BACKUP TAKE_SNAPSHOT or something.

Or consistent, continuous, online backups, and preferably with simpler 
and improved ease of use than offered by the BACKUP command or the 
seldom-mentioned BACKUP Manager.   This new approach with either data 
compression and quite possibly with data de-dup, of course.  Part of 
adding continuous archiving would almost certainly involve either some 
very clever tricks in the kernel or — probably easier and safer — an 
API and some retrofitting work in the applications; the addition of 
mechanisms and APIs for ensuring consistent copies of the active data.

While it is not a solution for everybody and every application, OS X 
with Time Machine does quite well in terms of its ease of use for most 
folks — and leagues beyond BACKUP, by most any measure — but Time 
Machine — like BACKUP — does tend to fall down on active data files.

This work isn't that far off of "live" server migration and of 
application checkpoint-restart and of process migration within a 
cluster, and some other related work, for that matter.

FWIW, some ZFS errata: <http://nex7.blogspot.com/2013/03/readme1st.html>


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