On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Chris Lee <cslee-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi All, > I hope this to bee food for thought as I am not able to code such a thing nor am I in need of such a thing but it seemed like a good idea when it struck me, so; > When an filesystem is snap shotted it is a function of the running filesystem to provide the data in that snapshot. (or is that lvms doing?) > Most users who use snapshots for backup are going to mount the snap shot and then tar it up. > Would it be a good idea to provide a virtual file through something like the sysfs that is a tar representation of the snapshot so that a backup can just copy the tar file off as needed? > > Thanks for reading, > > Regards, > Chris. That seems like an overly specialized feature for the kernel. And even if it were a good idea conceptually: 1) ext4 does not currently offer filesystem snapshot capability. It is handled at a lower level in the block stack. (ie. either in the hardware array or via device mapper). 2) Those lower levels simply are aware of blocks / sectors, not files. Thus they have no ability to create a "tar" file. fyi: btrfs is a more integrated filesystem, so it is at least technically feasible with it. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Head of EDD Tape Extraction and Processing team Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer CNN/TruTV Aired Forensic Imaging Demo - http://insession.blogs.cnn.com/2010/03/23/how-computer-evidence-gets-retrieved/ The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
