Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS snapshot GUI
Very good points Rang, I'm going to add to them with a few of my own. It should be possible to restore individual files rather than rolling back the snapshot and I guess that's what was meant here. I think the terminology in the original post may not be too clear. However, my impression reading this is that this is an application that runs directly on the machine. If so, we're missing an opportunity here. Solaris isn't really an end user OS, it's more of a server OS. If you are going to implement a nice GUI for restoring files from a snapshot, you really want that to work over a network as well as on the local machine. Ironically, if you're a windows user you already have that ability over the network with Solaris. Run ZFS and Samba and windows users can use Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client to right-click any file and easily restore it from a snapshot: http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/windows/instructions/shadowcopy.htm What's really needed is a way to do that on Solaris and Linux machines over the network. Integration with Apple's time machine would be great too (especially as it sounds like they may be making it compatible with ZFS), but unless somebody high up in Sun speaks to Apple I don't see that happening. So you need two UI's: - On the server side a simple UI is needed for creating and scheduling snapshots of the filesystem. Tim Foster's service would be a good starting point for that: http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_automatic_for_the_people - On the client side a simple UI is needed that allows users to easily see previous versions of files and folders, and either restore them in place or copy old versions to a new location. And the client side of this would want to be capable of running either locally or over the network. I think you could probably bodge this by virtue of the fact that you can browse the files in a snapshot. Performance would probably be slow however and I've no doubt that far better performance could be achieved with hooks into ZFS (which incidentally would benefit apple if they want to move time machine to ZFS). That kind of thing is way outside my experience however, but it would be good if somebody at Sun could think about it. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS snapshot GUI
Hi, In respect of snapshots :- a) should the snapshot process it self be modified to allow restoring of individual files via zfs rollback b) should there be a zfs rollfile to selectively restore files from a snapshot c) should there be a zfs purge which would allow file(s) to be removed from zfs including all snapshots Ross wrote: Very good points Rang, I'm going to add to them with a few of my own. It should be possible to restore individual files rather than rolling back the snapshot and I guess that's what was meant here. I think the terminology in the original post may not be too clear. However, my impression reading this is that this is an application that runs directly on the machine. If so, we're missing an opportunity here. Solaris isn't really an end user OS, it's more of a server OS. If you are going to implement a nice GUI for restoring files from a snapshot, you really want that to work over a network as well as on the local machine. Ironically, if you're a windows user you already have that ability over the network with Solaris. Run ZFS and Samba and windows users can use Microsoft's Shadow Copy Client to right-click any file and easily restore it from a snapshot: http://helpdesk.its.uiowa.edu/windows/instructions/shadowcopy.htm What's really needed is a way to do that on Solaris and Linux machines over the network. Integration with Apple's time machine would be great too (especially as it sounds like they may be making it compatible with ZFS), but unless somebody high up in Sun speaks to Apple I don't see that happening. So you need two UI's: - On the server side a simple UI is needed for creating and scheduling snapshots of the filesystem. Tim Foster's service would be a good starting point for that: http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_automatic_for_the_people - On the client side a simple UI is needed that allows users to easily see previous versions of files and folders, and either restore them in place or copy old versions to a new location. And the client side of this would want to be capable of running either locally or over the network. I think you could probably bodge this by virtue of the fact that you can browse the files in a snapshot. Performance would probably be slow however and I've no doubt that far better performance could be achieved with hooks into ZFS (which incidentally would benefit apple if they want to move time machine to ZFS). That kind of thing is way outside my experience however, but it would be good if somebody at Sun could think about it. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss __ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email __ -- Regards Russell ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS snapshot GUI
hi there, On Thu, 2007-11-22 at 00:53 -0800, Ross wrote: It should be possible to restore individual files rather than rolling back the snapshot and I guess that's what was meant here. I think the terminology in the original post may not be too clear. Yep, I agree. However, my impression reading this is that this is an application that runs directly on the machine. If so, we're missing an opportunity here. Solaris isn't really an end user OS, it's more of a server OS. If you are going to implement a nice GUI for restoring files from a snapshot, you really want that to work over a network as well as on the local machine. Definitely - you can do that now over NFS. Here space/timf is a ZFS dataset on my desktop machine, haiiro. On spoon a client machine, I browse to haiiro's NFS shares: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cd /net/haiiro/space/timf/.zfs [EMAIL PROTECTED] cd snapshot [EMAIL PROTECTED] ls -1 total 56 3 backup-2007-09-25-16-21-05/ 3 backup-2007-09-25-16-49-42/ 3 backup-2007-09-25-16-53-37/ 3 backup-2007-09-25-17-35-07/ . . etc. Those are all snapshots taken on the filesystems on haiiro. You can also mkdir inside a remote directories to create snapshots, assuming you've been delegated that permission: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mkdir new [EMAIL PROTECTED] ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] /usr/sbin/zfs list space/[EMAIL PROTECTED] NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT space/[EMAIL PROTECTED] 0 - 5,18G - - On the client side a simple UI is needed that allows users to easily see previous versions of files and folders, and either restore them in place or copy old versions to a new location. And that's what this is all about - trying to find a cleaner way than http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_on_your_desktop to tie the client and server sides together. cheers, tim -- Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops http://blogs.sun.com/timf ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS snapshot GUI
How does the ability to set a snapshot schedule for a particular *file* or *folder* interact with the fact that ZFS snapshots are on a per-filesystem basis? This seems a poor fit. If I choose to snapshot my Important Documents folder every 5 minutes, that's implicitly creating snapshots of my Giant Video Downloads folder every 5 minutes too, if they're both in the same file system. It seems unwise not to expose this to the user. One possibility would be for the enable snapshots menu item to implicitly apply to the root of the file system in which the selected item is. So in the example shown, right-clicking on Documents would bring up a dialog labeled something like Automatic snapshots for /home/cb114949. == I don't think it's a good idea to replace Enable Automatic Snapshots by Restore from Snapshot because there's no obvious way to Disable Automatic Snapshots (or change their properties). (It appears one could probably do that from the properties dialog, but that's certainly not obvious to a user who has turned this on using the menu and now wants to make a change -- if you can turn it on in the menu, you should be able to turn it off in the menu too.) == If Roll back affects the whole file system, it definitely should NOT be an option when right-clicking on a file or folder within the file system! This is a recipe for disaster. I would not present this as an option at all -- it's already in the Restore Files dialog. Also, All files will be restored is not a good description for rollback. That really means All changes since the selected snapshot will be lost. I can readily imagine a user thinking, I deleted three files, so if I choose to restore all files, I'll get those three back [without losing the other work I've done]. == Just a few random comments. This message posted from opensolaris.org ___ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
