jsprag wrote: > Good summation. The two aren't mutually exclusive, of course. If a > user wanted they could have RAID mirroring, another internal drive for > nightly (or any other interval) backups, and an external backup. > Starts to add up to a lot of drives though...
quite. This is why I like ZFS. [I ought to declare an interest, as I work for Sun; then again, it's all open-source, so... :)] > Interesting thought. Not that familiar with Solaris or ZFS but might > be worth looking into. I recommend having a look; try downloading the latest OpenSolaris live cd and having a play. ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, so snapshots are implemented very naturally. When you take a snapshot, all that happens is that future writes to a particular block of a file are redirected, and the original block is kept for the snapshot, the new block for the "real" filesystem. It's possible to have thousands of snapshots. Very space efficient. The GNOME file-manager has an extension to browse the data in snapshots - which can also be accessed directly - via the "time slider", in practice very much like MacOS Time Machine, but integrated into the filesystem. ZFS also provides various levels of RAID, including striping, mirroring, and two levels of efficient versions of RAID5 (RAIDZ, RAIDZ2), without any need for a separate volume manager. There are SC build instructions for OpenSolaris on the wiki, and I'm looking towards making an unofficial nightly build regularly available, in the OpenSolaris IPS pkg format. cheers, calum. _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
