Needless to say, this was a pretty interesting piece of the keynote from a technical point of view that had quite a few of us scratching our heads. After talking to some Apple engineers, it seems like what they're doing is more or less this:
When a file is modified, the kernel fires off an event which a user-land daemon listens for. Every so often, the user-land daemon does something like a snapshot of the affected portions of the filesystem with hard links (including hard links to directories -- I'm not making this up). That might be a bit off, but it's the impression I was left with. Anyhow, very slick UI, sort of dubious back end, interesting possibility for integration with ZFS. Adam On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 12:08:17PM -0700, Eric Schrock wrote: > Yeah, I just noticed this line: > > "Backup Time: Time Machine will back up every night at midnight, unless > you select a different time from this menu." > > So this is just standard backups, with a (very) slick GUI layered on > top. From the impression of the text-only rumor feed, it sounded more > impressive, from a filesystem implementation perspective. Still, the > GUI integration is pretty nice, and implies that they're backups are in > some easily accessed form. Otherwise, extracting hundreds of files from > a compressed stream would induce too much delay for the interactive > stuff they describe. > > - Eric > > On Mon, Aug 07, 2006 at 08:58:15AM -1000, David J. Orman wrote: > > Reading that site, it sounds EXACTLY like snapshots. It doesn't sound > > to require a second disk, it just gives you the option of backing up > > to one. Sounds like it snapshots once a day (configurable) and then > > "sends" the snapshot to another drive/server if you request it to do > > so. Looks like they just made snapshots accesible to desktop users. > > Pretty impressive how they did the GUI work too. > > > > -- > Eric Schrock, Solaris Kernel Development http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss -- Adam Leventhal, Solaris Kernel Development http://blogs.sun.com/ahl _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
