[desktop-discuss] ZFS snapshot GUI

[Calum Benson]

On 20 Nov 2007, at 12:56, Christian Kelly wrote:

> Hi Calum,
>
> heh, as it happens, I was tinkering with pygtk to see how difficult  
> this would be :)
>
> Supposing I have a ZFS on my machine called root/export/home which  
> is mounted on /export/home. Then I have my home dir as /export/home/ 
> chris. Say I only want to snapshot and backup /export/home/chris/ 
> Documents. I can't create a snapshot of /export/home/chris/ 
> Documents as it is a directory, I have to create a snapshot of the  
> parent ZFS, in this case /export/home/. So there isn't really the  
> granularity that the attached spec implies. Someone correct me if  
> I'm wrong, but I just tried it and it didn't work.

Right, for Phase 0 the thinking was that you'd really have to  
manually set up whatever pools and filesystems you required first.   
So in your example, you (or, perhaps, the Indiana installer) would  
have had to set up /export/home/chris/Documents as a ZFS filesystem  
in its own right before you could start taking snapshots of it.

Were we to stick with this general design, in later phases, creating  
a new ZFS filesystem on the fly, and migrating the contents of the  
existing folder into to it, would hopefully happen behind the scenes  
when you selected that folder to be backed up.  (That could  
presumably be quite a long operation, though, for folders with large  
contents.)

> I've had a bit of a look at 'Time Machine' and I'd be more in  
> favour of that style of backup. Just back up everything so I don't  
> have to think about it. My feeling is that picking individual  
> directories out just causes confusion. Think of it this way: how  
> much change is there on a daily basis on your desktop/laptop? Those  
> snapshots aren't going to grow very quickly.

I have no problem looking at it from that angle if it turns out  
that's what people want-- much of the UI would be fairly similar.   
But at the same time, I don't necessarily always expect OSX users'  
requirements to be the same as Solaris users' requirements-- I'd  
especially like to hear from people who are already using Tim's  
snapshot and backup services, to find out how they use it and what  
their needs are.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems