> If > I'm interpreting correctly, you're talking about a > couple of features, neither of which is in ZFS yet, ... > 1. The ability to restore individual files from a > snapshot, in the same way an entire snapshot is > restored - simply using the blocks that are already > stored. > > 2. The ability to store (and restore from) snapshots > on external media.
Those sound useful. particularly the ability to restore a single file, even if it was only from a "full" send instead of a snapshot. But I dont think that's what I'm asking for :-) Lemme try again. Lets say that you have a mega-source tree, in one huge zfs filesystem. (lets say, the entire ON distribution or something :-) Lets say that you had a full zfs send done, Nov 1st. then, between then, and today, there were "assorted things done" to the source tree. Major things. Things that people suddenly realized were "bad". But they werent sure exactly how/why. They just knew things worked nov 1st, but are broken now. Pretend there's no such thing as tags, etc. So: they want to get things up and running, maybe even only in read-only mode, from the nov 1st full send. But they also want to take a look at the changes. And they want to do it in a very space-efficient manner. It would be REALLY REALLY NICE, to be able to take a full send of /zfs/srctree, and restore it to /zfs/[EMAIL PROTECTED], or something like that. Given that [making up numbers] out of 1 million src files, only 1000 have changed, it would be "really nice", to have those 999,000 files that have NOT changed, not be doubly allocated in both /zfs/srctree and /zfs/[EMAIL PROTECTED] They will be actually hardlinked/snapshot-duped/whatever the terminology is. I guess you might refer to what I'm talking about, as taking a synthetic snapshot. Kinda like veritas backup, etc. can "synthesize" full dumps, from a sequence of full+ incrementals, and then write out a "real" full dump, onto a single tape, as if a "full dump" happened on the date of a particular incremental. Except that in what I 'm talking about for zfs, it would be synthesizing a zfs snapshot of a filesystem, that was made for the full zsend (even though the original "snapshot" has since been deleted) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
