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by macns 2577 days ago
what is CoW?
3 comments

Copy on Write, presumably to save them from crypto-locking ransomware. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryptoLocker
Its the backups that save you from crypto malware.
True, but I have yet to find a reason to prefer full (or even incremental) backups over CoW. Full backups are just too big and slow, and good reliable open-source and cross-platform incremental backup software is hard to find.

I've found using Syncthing for Client-->NAS-->Off-site with BtrFS snapshots on both servers to be just perfect (of course, YMMV).

> good reliable open-source and cross-platform incremental backup software is hard to find

I've been using rsnapshot for at least a decade, and it's available wherever perl and hard links are available (which isn't windows, at least pre-WSL).

Here, I found this by searching for "cow file sync":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy-on-write

>Copy-on-write (CoW or COW), sometimes referred to as implicit sharing[1] or shadowing,[2] is a resource-management technique used in computer programming to efficiently implement a "duplicate" or "copy" operation on modifiable resources.[3] If a resource is duplicated but not modified, it is not necessary to create a new resource; the resource can be shared between the copy and the original. Modifications must still create a copy, hence the technique: the copy operation is deferred to the first write. By sharing resources in this way, it is possible to significantly reduce the resource consumption of unmodified copies, while adding a small overhead to resource-modifying operations.

Copy in write i guess