This may be a simple question, or it may be hugely complex. If it is hugely complex, please don't hold back, shorten, or simplify your answer for my benefit. ;-)
I understand, when you right-click and go to "Previous Versions" it's generating the list of previous versions based on snapshots. What I am wondering about is ... There are many different possible techniques to translate from snapshots to previous versions. I am wondering which technique(s) is/are being used to generate that translation. For example, one simple technique is to blindly assume the name and location of an object has not changed. If a user looks for previous versions of "/tank/foo/bar.txt" then the system would identify "/tank/.zfs/snapshot/snapname/foo/bar.txt" because it has precisely the same name and path as the live filesystem. There are some situations where that would be suboptimal. If path names have been renamed, or moved, then the system wouldn't be able to find previous versions of that object. Another technique would be to identify the inode in the present filesystem, and then reverse-resolve that inode to pathname in all the snapshots, thus locating all the previous versions of that object, even if it's been renamed or relocated. My understanding is that this reverse inode-to-pathname technique is not currently possible for files, because files have no reference to their parent directory(ies), but every directory has a '..' entry which references its parent. So this reverse-lookup from inode to pathname is at least theoretically possible for directories in the present version of ZFS. Or nearly any filesystem, including non-ZFS systems. So, my question is, precisely how the "previous versions" list gets generated from snapshots. Thank you... _______________________________________________ cifs-discuss mailing list cifs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/cifs-discuss
