This may be a bit poorly thought through but in this case I don't really know enough to really think it through.
My back ground is linux... there I used a tool called rsnapshot which used rsync and some hardlink magic to create versioned backups. But take very little space. By versioned I don't mean as in version control but just copies of files as they change. It worked by running what they called an hourly backup then rotating that out to daily weekly etc. even the hourly term only really meant a specific kind of run... not necessarily actually done hourly. But the punch line was you always had a full backup under the directory created by hourly All the backups used hard links to just create a name, no duplicate data, in the rotated directory unless the file had changed. That's where the space saving came in. I'm trying to see now how to do something similar with snapshots. However I don't really understand how Copy On Write works, even though I read some web pages about it. So I wanted to hear some examples of how zfs users would handle something like that. The end goal being that user can go into these snapshots or whatever else it may require and retrieve the same file for a day ago or a week ago, or month etc if desired. So there is a running copy of any changes going back in time. And all done in as little disk space as possible. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
