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Date:      Sun, 24 Sep 2000 16:33:33 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
To:        Barry Pederson <bpederson@geocities.com>
Cc:        arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Snapshots in the Fast Filesystem
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1000924162624.46412A-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <39CD0C1B.324AA1C5@geocities.com>

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On Sat, 23 Sep 2000, Barry Pederson wrote:

> Is there (or will there be) some way to get a list of snapshots that
> have been created on a filesystem?  Kirk suggests following a convention
> for naming snapshot files, but if that doesn't happen for some reason,
> it would be good to have some foolproof way of determining what snaps
> exist.  Otherwise, I suppose you could search a filesystem for files
> that -appear- to be almost as large as the filesystem itself, but that
> seems kind of a kludge - and I don't know if I'd want to trust a script
> to interpret those results correctly.

I won't address the other issues discussed in your email, although I do
have some thoughts on them, but will address this one.  Snapshot files
have the SF_SNAPSHOT file flag set on them -- I believe this is not
cleared by ufs_getattr() and hence is probably exposed via stat().  I'm
not sure our ls -ol output understands the snapshot flag, but a custom
modification to ls, or a manual tool for stating and identifying files
with the flag set sounds like it should work.  That said, I haven't tried
this :-).

Given that snapshots should only be created by privileged users, hopefully
you won't have the opportunity to lose one.  I've been creating my
snapshots under /.snapshot on the file system, matching my /.attribute
file for extended attributes.  In future versions of snapshots, it might
be spiffy to expose mounted snapshots of directories under a .snapshot
directory in each subdirectory, in the style of NetApp.  You can certainly
imagine the current implementation permitting it, given sufficient boredom
on the part of Kirk.

  Robert N M Watson 

robert@fledge.watson.org              http://www.watson.org/~robert/
PGP key fingerprint: AF B5 5F FF A6 4A 79 37  ED 5F 55 E9 58 04 6A B1
TIS Labs at Network Associates, Safeport Network Services




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