One of the most useful things I've found with ZFS dedup (way to go Jeff Bonwick and Co.!) is the ability to consolidate backups. I had six different complete backups of all of my files spread out over various hard drives, and dedup allowed me to consolidate them into something that took less twice the space of the original. I was thrilled when I saw this the first time.
This led me to another idea: I have been using DVDs for small backups here and there for a decade now, and have a huge pile of several hundred. They have a lot of overlapping content, so I was thinking of feeding the entire stack into some sort of DVD autoloader, which would just read each disk, and write its contents to a ZFS filesystem with dedup enabled. Even if the autoloader had to run on Windows or Linux, I could just use a mounted drive to achieve the same ends. That would allow me to consolidate a few hundred CDs and DVDs onto probably a terabyte or so, which could then be kept conveniently on a hard drive and archived to tape. Does anyone know of a DVD autoloader that would allow me to do this easily, and if someone might be willing to rent one to me (I'm in the Boston area)? I only need to do this once. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
