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Call me crazy, but at work I'd love to have the snapshot capability. I mostly run linux in a VM. Usually we use Exceed on Demand and operate remotely, but the

Call me crazy, but at work I'd love to have the snapshot capability. I mostly run linux in a VM. Usually we use Exceed on Demand and operate remotely, but the satellite office I'm in has terrible internet. So I run locally. And I have thought about running with ZFS and exporting it through an SMB share. I realize I wouldn't really be getting much of the safety benefit (beyond checksumming I guess), but being able to snapshot would be lovely. I keep an external backup, and I use git on windows for manually snapshotting, but it's still a bit of a pain, and to be able to snap the whole filesystem seems awesome. I have 32 gigs of ram, and give half to the VM... Any opinions on this idea?

DigitalJack 9y ago
To clarify a little, half my work happens in windows due to using office and outlook extensively. And before anyone suggests open office type options, just don't. For the size and complexity of our documents, it's just not feasible.
- rincebrain 9y ago
  You might want to read about NTFS's Volume Shadow Copy functionality, or I believe there's glue code so that you can expose ZFS snapshots on datasets when they're shared over CIFS, but I haven't tried that in a long time.
blackflame7000 9y ago
Heres an article on how to create snapshots with ZFS http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbcya/index.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbcya/index.htm...
viraptor 9y ago
Why not invert? Run linux as the main system and office + outlook in the VM. There are some pretty good seamless solutions for window display as well. (vbox, vmware) Then you can have everything on ZFS and you can keep the whole windows disk as a separate volume. Snapshoting both should be trivial in that case.
- DigitalJack 9y ago
  I'd get dinged for putting an unauthorized computer on the network. with linux in the VM I can masquerade. I'd love to do the reverse though, windows on my laptop is maddening. 7 minute boot times.
  - viraptor 9y ago
    I'm not sure what you're referring to, but any network changed you can do on windows, I'm pretty sure you can replicate on Linux. (TTL fixes included)
jlgaddis 9y ago
> I realize I wouldn't really be getting much of the safety benefit ... You'd get volume shadow copies and your users would get the ability to rollback files on their own.

DigitalJack 9y ago

To clarify a little, half my work happens in windows due to using office and outlook extensively. And before anyone suggests open office type options, just don't. For the size and complexity of our documents, it's just not feasible.

rincebrain 9y ago
You might want to read about NTFS's Volume Shadow Copy functionality, or I believe there's glue code so that you can expose ZFS snapshots on datasets when they're shared over CIFS, but I haven't tried that in a long time.

blackflame7000 9y ago

Heres an article on how to create snapshots with ZFS http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbcya/index.html http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbcya/index.htm...

viraptor 9y ago

Why not invert? Run linux as the main system and office + outlook in the VM. There are some pretty good seamless solutions for window display as well. (vbox, vmware) Then you can have everything on ZFS and you can keep the whole windows disk as a separate volume. Snapshoting both should be trivial in that case.

DigitalJack 9y ago
I'd get dinged for putting an unauthorized computer on the network. with linux in the VM I can masquerade. I'd love to do the reverse though, windows on my laptop is maddening. 7 minute boot times.
- viraptor 9y ago
  I'm not sure what you're referring to, but any network changed you can do on windows, I'm pretty sure you can replicate on Linux. (TTL fixes included)

jlgaddis 9y ago

> I realize I wouldn't really be getting much of the safety benefit ... You'd get volume shadow copies and your users would get the ability to rollback files on their own.