On May 30, 2010, at 12:27 AM, Xin LI wrote:
I think this sounds like a good idea but I think we may probably want to explore a more general mechanism, e.g. a daemon that "listen"s system events like file system full, etc. and execute some user defined actions.
I could definitely get on board with that, and I think such a mechanism would be generally useful even without my idea. I wouldn't mind having a mechanism to send me an IM whenever I need to respond to something urgently.
One thing that we want to avoid is that by making the "automatic recycle" we would open a new race between system and user backup programs, i.e. if you remove an intermediate snapshot, 'zfs send' may fail at receiving side, if incremental send is being used. We would need a way to "notify" that a 'zfs send' is underway.
Well, two things about that: first, if I were implementing it in a vacuum without any input from anyone else, I'd make it simply delete the oldest snapshot. There's precedence in OS X's Time Machine, and that's probably what most people would want and expect anyway.
Second, I'd treat those almost as "property" of the OS. While there's nothing magical about them, they're created (and subject to deletion) at the whim of the system, and you shouldn't be sending or receiving them or doing anything else that assumes their integrity. You could still create and destroy your own snapshots as needed, but the OS would manage these on its own.
Again, this is how I would handle it in a vacuum if I didn't know or care how anyone else wanted to use it. Still, I think those might be reasonable assumptions.
-- Kirk Strauser _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
