[OpenAFS-devel] Re: Backups using commercial products

[Ken Hornstein]

>> What I wonder is - how hard would it be to access the contents of an AFS
>> volume from a file server, without going through AFS itself - i.e. by direct
>> file access - sortof a really fast 'vos dump' equivalent.
>
>Good question.  Now that we have the source I'm sure it would be
>possible to figure out the structure and read it directly from
>disk.  Maybe somebody's even done this already.

I've done part of that already (dumptool takes a reasonable stab at
documenting the dump structure).  However ... I'm not completely convinced
that it will be _that_ much faster, since I suspect the bottleneck
is reading the data off of the disk (lots of seeks).  But hey, I could
be wrong.

--Ken