[OpenAFS-devel] AFS + GFS = crazy?

[John Hascall]

> 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.
   (but I said they that they were...)

> 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.

   As I mentioned in another message, they do lazy delete, and you
   schedule when space is reclaimed.  It might actually be an
   interesting idea to extend the lazy-delete idea to simply
   making a new copy of a chunk everytime it is written -- giving
   you the ability to go back to any instant in time (until you
   cleanup the old versions).

John