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We are moving in the right direction with copy-on-write snapshots. What would be neat is an 'immutable' filesystem, where nothing is erased (up to garbage colle

We are moving in the right direction with copy-on-write snapshots. What would be neat is an 'immutable' filesystem, where nothing is erased (up to garbage collection). This is likely to extreme to be practical, as we don't want to copy an entire block to change one bit, or read through a journel for every fs action. Even in theory, we don't want do spend the diskspace to record the precise state at every point in time. Now that I think about it, it shouldn't be to hard to turn this into a workable product for general use. Automatically take a snapshot every 5 minutes, and present a the user a program that broweses the filesystem at time X, probably with integration into the filemanager to restore files/folders. Practically speacking, it needs some form of pruning. Probably along the lines of save every 5 minutes for the past hour, etc. My only concern with this is how optimized for frequent snapshots Btrfs is. Either way, I know what I am doing this weekend.

lotheac 12y ago
> Automatically take a snapshot every 5 minutes, and present a the user a program that broweses the filesystem at time X, probably with integration into the filemanager to restore files/folders. Something like this? http://java.dzone.com/news/killer-feature-opensolaris-200 http://java.dzone.com/news/killer-feature-opensolaris-200
- gizmo686 12y ago
  That sounds like it is doing something fancier then periodic snapshotting, such as using an immutable filesystem, where every fs operation is inherently lossless (up to garbage collection). Of course, I might be reading to much into the continous nature of a slider. Does anyone have experience with that feature?
  - lotheac 12y ago
    (Sorry for the late reply) In OpenSolaris it just used cronjobs to create zfs snapshots.
Silhouette 12y ago
There are certainly some very grand schemes we could adopt to improve this specific problem, but let's not overlook the simple things. Every popular OS GUI has included some sort of "recycle bin" concept for a long time. There is no reason at all that a text shell shouldn't provide the same safety net for its delete command.

lotheac 12y ago

> Automatically take a snapshot every 5 minutes, and present a the user a program that broweses the filesystem at time X, probably with integration into the filemanager to restore files/folders. Something like this? http://java.dzone.com/news/killer-feature-opensolaris-200 http://java.dzone.com/news/killer-feature-opensolaris-200

gizmo686 12y ago
That sounds like it is doing something fancier then periodic snapshotting, such as using an immutable filesystem, where every fs operation is inherently lossless (up to garbage collection). Of course, I might be reading to much into the continous nature of a slider. Does anyone have experience with that feature?
- lotheac 12y ago
  (Sorry for the late reply) In OpenSolaris it just used cronjobs to create zfs snapshots.

Silhouette 12y ago

There are certainly some very grand schemes we could adopt to improve this specific problem, but let's not overlook the simple things. Every popular OS GUI has included some sort of "recycle bin" concept for a long time. There is no reason at all that a text shell shouldn't provide the same safety net for its delete command.