[OpenAFS-devel] Re: Backups using commercial products

[Earl R Shannon]

Hello,

I haven't looked at the code, but I suspect it would be pretty involved.
It does mean thinking about backups differently than AFS currently looks
at them. 

Something else that I suspect might be easier to implement which I also
thought would be nice was a feature that I've seen on some other backup
products. AFS currently creates backup volumes which are essentially
snapshots of the RW volume inodes in use at the time of the backup
volume creation. Why not maintain several snapshots going back some
number of days ( a configurable option ). Most of our restore requests
only require us going back less than a week. If we had seven days of
backup online it would prevent the necessity of pulling a tape. Yes,
this would mean that disk usage would increase, but that's why one would
make such an option configurable for the number of days. One would make
the decision of what was needed vs. the cost in his or her
implementation
of AFS.

Anyway, just a thought. I'm sure other features are much more urgent
than this, such as PAM support. 

Regards,
Earl Shannon

"Neulinger, Nathan R." wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> -- Nathan
>