Hi
I was just wondering…
The openSolaris ZFS snapshot feature is really cool. I just gave 2008.11 a go and was really impressed by their snapshot feature. especially the whole timeslider thingy they have integrated right into gnome’s nautilus.
i was led to ask: is there a possibility of having such a feature on a linux filesystem. i don’t think ext3 can support such a thing. (but maybe i am wrong…i dunno really). in any case even Mac OSX has the ‘time machine’ stuff.
is there such a thing for linux? is it planned? is it possible? :rolleyes:
BTRFS will have snapshot abilities and more, just like ZFS now. You will have to wait until it is included in the kernel and deployed by distros. Other than BTRFS, I don’t know of any other snapshot filesystems for Linux (maybe Tux3?). You may also want to look into Zumastor, though not sure if this will suit your needs
You could give a try for ZFS on Linux using FUSE (Filesystem on userland) but it is not recommended because then the Filesystem is not so well controlled by the OS, because it is on userland, outside of OS.
The BTRFS filesystem should be included to Linux OS on 2.6.30 version (the Linux kernel is the OS) so it should not go longer than one year. So if it is a really a “must” to get, then FUSE is the only way, unless there comes other filesystems what allows it. But there is still a problem… you dont have anykind GUI to control it. I am currently making mockup for KDE4 dolphin, more like the timeslider on Nautilus what is done for OpenSolaris.
Altough, there is snapshot functionality for normal filesystems, but it is manual job, a commandline job and it does not work so well on normal usage. More like the server thing. So I would not suggest such. The snapshot feature should be Operating System job, not any application or other things what are on userland. This way the feature is faster, more robust and much faster.
