Well, I really like the idea of an automatic service to manage send/receives to backup devices, so if you guys don't mind, I'm going to share some other ideas for features I think would be useful.
One of the first is that you need some kind of capacity management and snapshot deletion. Eventually backup media are going to fill and you need to either prompt the user to remove snapshots, or even better, you need to manage the media automatically and remove old snapshots to make space for new ones. I'm thinking that a setup like time slider would work well, where you specify how many of each age of snapshot to keep. But I would want to be able to specify different intervals for different devices. eg. I might want just the latest one or two snapshots on a USB disk so I can take my files around with me. On a removable drive however I'd be more interested in preserving a lot of daily / weekly backups. I might even have an archive drive that I just store monthly snapshots on. What would be really good would be a GUI that can estimate how much space is going to be taken up for any configuration. You could use the existing snapshots on disk as a guide, and take an average size for each interval, giving you average sizes for hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc... That could then be used in a GUI (I'm thinking a visual column with colours for each type of snapshot showing how full the drive would be). You know the size of the external drive (and that's fixed for each device), you also know the average sizes of snapshots, so you can show the user how much space they will have, and let them play around with the numbers. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
