On Mon, 2013-08-26 at 10:28 -0500, Andrew Deason wrote: > On Sun, 25 Aug 2013 21:05:41 +0530 (IST) > Shouri Chatterjee <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I wanted to ask about "vos shadow" and whether it is being used as a > > solution on production systems to back-up user home directories. > > I believe it is, but I'll let others speak if they are doing so.
I'll point out at this point that vos includes both high- and low-level operations in one command-line tool, and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. The high-level operations are things like create, move, backup, release, and remove, which are intended to be used for everyday administration. Low-level operations like changeloc, clone, delentry, shadow, and zap are intended for unusual situations or as building blocks for use in more complex operations. "vos shadow" by itself was not intended as a backup mechanism of any kind. Rather, it was intended to be used in constructing a system that would create and track entire shadow servers, which could be easily brought online if a "real" server failed. I never built that larger system, but perhaps others have done so. > Yes, one of the downsides of shadow volumes is that using them is not > documented as well as other features, and they aren't tested as much. Because there actually is no such feature as a "shadow volume". Manual pages notwithstanding, the "vos shadow" command does not "create a shadow volume"; it merely provides a way to do the same sequence of cloning and forwarding full and incremental dumps that is used by the move and copy commands, but without deleting the source volume or making any changes to the VLDB. -- Jeff _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
