On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 09:21:06AM +0000, Chris Benson wrote: > I had a dem yesterday of the NetApps Filer. The presenter took a > snapshot of the 500GB user filestore (takes ~5sec), ... then deleted his > 2GB home dir: email, presentations, software, the whole lot. > > Smiling all the while. > > Of course it took another 5 sec or so to recover it from the > ~snapshots/test01 virtual directory representing the snapshot, but it's > a hell of a party-piece.
That's a nice demo, but that's not what snapshots are good for, of course. What they are good for is making your backup entirely self-consistent. (which is a real problem with backing stuff up). So, process is: + take a snapshot of the filesystem + backup snapshot + clear snapshot (so you're not using large amounts of disk for it) I'm sure that at one point, the NetApps could take automagic snapshots for pre-defined time-periods away from where you were in time. This meant that each directory node had a directory node called ".snapshots" which had a time in them. That was impressive too. -- Lusercop.net - LARTing Lusers everywhere since 2002
