Very good points Rang, I'm going to add to them with a few of my own. It should be possible to restore individual files rather than rolling back the snapshot and I guess that's what was meant here. I think the terminology in the original post may not be too clear.
However, my impression reading this is that this is an application that runs directly on the machine. If so, we're missing an opportunity here. Solaris isn't really an end user OS, it's more of a server OS. If you are going to implement a nice GUI for restoring files from a snapshot, you really want that to work over a network as well as on the local machine. Ironically, if you're a windows user you already have that ability over the network with Solaris. Run ZFS and Samba and windows users can use Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client to right-click any file and easily restore it from a snapshot: http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/windows/instructions/shadowcopy.htm What's really needed is a way to do that on Solaris and Linux machines over the network. Integration with Apple's time machine would be great too (especially as it sounds like they may be making it compatible with ZFS), but unless somebody high up in Sun speaks to Apple I don't see that happening. So you need two UI's: - On the server side a simple UI is needed for creating and scheduling snapshots of the filesystem. Tim Foster's service would be a good starting point for that: http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_automatic_for_the_people - On the client side a simple UI is needed that allows users to easily see previous versions of files and folders, and either restore them in place or copy old versions to a new location. And the client side of this would want to be capable of running either locally or over the network. I think you could probably bodge this by virtue of the fact that you can browse the files in a snapshot. Performance would probably be slow however and I've no doubt that far better performance could be achieved with hooks into ZFS (which incidentally would benefit apple if they want to move time machine to ZFS). That kind of thing is way outside my experience however, but it would be good if somebody at Sun could think about it. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
