Re: Is ZFS ready for production?

On 2006-08-21 20:59:40 +0100, Gary Meerschaert <gary.meerschaert@xxxxxxxxx> said:

In the Auto industry they are needed for recall, liability, and product updates. Files are kept for 25 years after the last production, which can be 50 years after the initial design concepts. (Think the old GM G vans) Files (and tapes) are kept in a mine. All drawings are transfered to vellum or mylar, as there is no telling if the computer equipment will still be available to read back very old tapes.

I agree with the `you need to be able to restore individual files from a long time ago' argument. But I suspect (or hope) that most people with these requirements are using some backup/archiving product which does all the fancy indexing etc so you can tell when the file last changed etc etc. The only one of these I've had significant experience with (NBU) used tar as the underlying archiver I think (and will probably thus gleefully throw out zfs ACLs etc, though they'll fix that in due course I hope).

I see snapshots more as a mechanism to allow point-in-time backups, and to make synchronising systems over high-latency links much easier. The former is important for backups, the second for DR etc.

--tim

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