[OpenAFS-devel] AFS + GFS = crazy?

[Mitch Collinsworth]

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, John Hascall wrote:

>> and yet people still backup raid filesystems.  there are certain
>> critical failures that cannot be solved with this solution.
>
> And which critical failures would that be?

They're not geographically redundant, for one thing.  I agree that
I can't give up backing up my raid servers.  Everything mentioned by
Gordon other than user error is covered by multiple geographically
redundant copies.

Yes, we hate doing tape backups.  No, we haven't given up doing them.
Yes, we'd love to come up with a clever means to get rid of them.
Infinite levels of .backup volumes that we can replicate to
geographically distributed servers might be a solution.

But I'm intrigued by John's idea.  It's been a long time since I
read the GFS white paper but I thought I remembered they never actually
physically delete any files.  So if you have a need to recover that
thing that you accidentally rm'd last week, there's still some method
available for getting it back.  I forget the details.  Am I
mis-remembering?

-Mitch