On Sat, Apr 24, 2010 at 2:17 PM, Ragnar Sundblad <ra...@csc.kth.se> wrote:

>
> On 24 apr 2010, at 16.43, Richard Elling wrote:
>
> On 24 apr 2010, at 09.18, Brandon High wrote:
> > To answer the question you linked to:
> > .shapshot/snapname.0/a/b/c/d.txt from the top of the filesystem
> > a/.snapshot/snapname.0/b/c/d.txt
> > a/e/.shapshot/snapname.0/c/d.txt
> > a/e/c/.snapshot/snapname.0/d.txt
>
> I really don't understand what you mean, I think the path is there
> just fine, and IMHO pretty much in the way you would expect.
>
> >> Make sense?
> >
> > Yes.  The contents of the directory are there, but the full pathname does
> > not follow because you changed a name in the path.  Whether this is
> > useful or not depends on whether you expect the path to be followed.
> >
> > It seems, the NetApp snapshot is a directory-level snapshot rather than a
> > file system snapshot. I cannot see how to merge the two, so perhaps
> > adding such a feature to ZFS could not leverage the file system snapshot?
>
> I believe NetApp snapshots are volume based in a fashion very much
> like zfs volume snapshots.
>

>From the sounds of things, it would appear that NetApp snapshots happen at
the volume/filesystem level.  However, they also provide a "shortcut"
.snapshot/ directory in every directory, allowing you to access that part of
the tree directly.

For example, with a filesystem root of /root:
  /root/branch/leaf/file.txt

Snapshots are taken.  You can either file.txt via any of the following:
  /root/.snapshot/branch/leaf/file.txt
  /root/branch/.snapshot/leaf/file.txt
  /root/branch/leaf/.snapshot/file.txt

Wheras with ZFS you can only access file.txt via:
  /root/.zfs/snapshot/snapname/branch/leaf/file.txt

>From the sounds of it, the .snapshot directory is just a pointer to the
corresponding directory in the actual snapshot tree.  The snapshots are not
actually saved per-directory.  They just give you a handy shortcut into that
same level in the snapshot directory tree.

Something like this would be very useful in ZFS, especially if you have deep
directory trees in a single ZFS filesystem, and you want to compare
files/directories in multiple snapshots.  For example, our backups server
has

/storage/backup/.zfs/snapshot/snap-date/sitename/servername/home/u/username/yadda-yadda

Which leads to very long cd commands to move between snapshots.  Being able
to just "cd .snapshot/snapname/" at arbitrary points in the tree, to access
that part of the tree in another snapshot, would be handy.

However, I've never actually used a NetApp system, so the above could be
totally out in left field.  It's just what I gathered from this discussion.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fjwc...@gmail.com
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