> Hi James, > > James Harper wrote: > > Is it possible to mount a VSS snapshot in ntfs-3g. Eg if I have a > > windows machine taking periodic snapshots, is it possible to mount one > > of those instead of the 'live' filesystem? > > > > This is probably possible, and having the specifications > surely helps. To my knowledge it has not been done yet. > > > More importantly, is it possible to mount it from a running filesystem > > via a shared block device? > > An interesting question for those who would have > already solved the first one... > > In what context (remote access, virtual machine, OS > emulation etc.) are you sharing (or wanting to share) > a block device ?
Xen > > What kind of synchronization are you suggesting to > update the data normally kept in memory (such as > the allocation table) ? > This is probably the sticking point. I don't know if it's possible for Dom0 (Xen host) to tell DomU (Xen guest - eg windows) to lock the snapshot and prevent it's deletion. I don't know either if the snapshot itself stays consistent at a block level - eg if a file changes is the original block duplicated for the snapshot or is a new block created for the updated file... I'm not even sure if this is within the scope of ntfs-3g. Maybe it would be better to have a device-mapper that manages the separation of snapshots into devices under Linux and then ntfs-3g just sees a block device (read only, of course). The locking would be managed at the device-mapper level, not ntfs-3g. This would need a communications channel between Dom0 and DomU to handle this but I've done such things before... Thanks James ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ ntfs-3g-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ntfs-3g-devel
