Hi, As a part of the next stages of the time-slider project we are looking into doing actual backups onto removable media devices such as USB media. The goal is to be able to view snapshots stored on the media and merge these into the list of viewable snapshots in nautilus giving the user a broader selection of restore points. In an ideal world we would like to detect the insertion of the selected media, have it automatically mounted and backup to it automatically. More info on time-slider: http://blogs.sun.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs
So to realise this we need to be sending datasets to a zfs formatted device instead of file blobs stored on a fat32 formatted storage device etc. We would aim to provide the user with a GUI to do this and create a zpool on the selected storage device. I started out testing out how ZFS handles hotplugging ZFS formatted USB storage stick. I tried creating a zpool on both the existing fdisk primary partition and letting the zpool have the whole device and create it's own EFI disk label. Creating a pool on the primary partition, hald complained that it could not mount the volume. It did somehow manage to mount the old fat32 filesystem that I thought I overwrote with the zpool create command however. Running zpool import gets the zpool mounted but I can then easily cause errors on the pool by writing into the mounted fat32 filesystem. When allowing zfs to use the whole device for the zpool, I don't get any error messages but no attempt to automatically mount the device appears to be made. I then have to run "zpool import" to get the pool mounted. If I then pull out the usb stick the system appears not to notice it as zfs status reports the zpool as being still online. Running the sync command seems to block for a very long time though, indicating the unplugging has upset ZFS. So, is ZFS usable on removable media in this manner? What steps could I take to avoid the kind of problems I'm seeing and are these considered bugs either in hald or zfs? It seems things are a far way off being able to just plug something in and out and having the system deal with it like it does for other filesystems. Thanks, Niall -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
