How do I get transparent, efficient, file system snapshotting or versioning on ext3/4?

Posted by shovas on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by shovas
Published on 2010-03-20T18:55:37Z Indexed on 2010/03/20 19:01 UTC
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Filed under:

filesystem

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versioning

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ext3

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git

I've long thought about versioning file systems. This is a killer feature and I've looked at Wayback, ext3cow, zfs, fuse solutions, or just cvs/svn/git overlays.

I consider ext3cow the model for my requirements. Transparent, efficient, but I can do without the extra ls abc@timestamp feature. As long as I somehow get automated, transparent versioning of my files.

It could be instantaneous or it could be based on snapshots on intervals of 10s, 30s, 1m, 5m, 15m, etc. Just something that will efficiently deal with thousands of files in a given directory all of various sizes, most small, but some upwards of 100m to 1gb.

ZFS isn't really an option as I'm on linux (and would prefer not to use it through fuse as I already have an ext3 setup I want to version, not something new).

What solutions are out there?

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