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in this thread SubjectRe: File system snapshopts: how valuable?
Colin Plumb wrote:  > I'm designing another file system, and
I've stolen a lot of ideas from > Netowrk Appliances' WAFL
(write anywhere file layout), which you can > see all about at >
One feature they have which is rather cool, is snapshots: they >
can take a static copy of the file system at any time and keep
it > on line as a backup. Further writes are done via COW
techniques; > new data is written to new blocks and the old data
is preserved. > The only problem is that this complicates things
like memory-mapped > files (which NetApp's NFS server doesn't
have to worry about). > I'm wondering whether it's a valuable
feature worth trying to > implement or not. > I suppose big-
linux would be a better place to ask, but does anyone here >
have any opinions? If it were free, obviously I'd put it in, but
> there's significant hassle involved in some of the
bookkeeping.  Very valuable, yes,