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by xte 2730 days ago
I'v tried it in the past because of Hammer storage (please do not call it fs), hw support at that time was far from good and desktop usability is reasonably low (though not much lower than {Open,Net}BSD) but without counting cluster's hammer by itself it's simply the storage we desperately need.

Think of a zfs log-structured instead of offer only snapshots. This means a complete protection against any accidental delete/overwrite since any write on disk create a new "checkpoint" and with proper file manager integration this means you can "browse history" of your's files and trees like they came from a VCS software.
1 comments
keithpeter 2730 days ago
So I could recover previously saved versions of e.g. a word-processing file? Used to use that back per-millennium on a Novel network with shared drives and it was very useful indeed. I've always wondered why that feature wasn't available in later systems.
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xte 2730 days ago
Yes and not only, you can see file history, just like commit history in git&c, you can compute diff on-the-fly both for single file and entire trees, you can "undo" last write etc

There is zero filemanager integration, so only manual CLI operation with a UI a bit less comfortable than zfs, encryption have few limitations, physical volume management does not offer "built-in raids implementation" of zfs (but you can create volume on top of any supported raid config), deduplication is a bit resource intensive, replication is not clustered even if you can "mirror" (incremental mirrors included) any volume locally or on a remote machine in a way similar to zfs one...

Essentially is a zfs with a raw and a bit less intuitive UI with logfs and few nice extras.

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loeg 2730 days ago
> deduplication is a bit resource intensive

That's true everywhere, outside specialized hardware offload.

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xte 2730 days ago
Yep, I mean compared to zfs live dedup it use less ram but generate an I/O load similar to a full resilvering... In that sense from my point of view it's "intensive", however consider that I only play with it, I do not have a solid idea on how it can be in real world scenarios...
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ams6110 2730 days ago
I think in those days it was simple filename versioning (VMS had it in the 1980s) and not based on diffs or COW.
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