Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 13th Jun 2007 20:33 UTC
The yes-no-yes-no saga concerning ZFS in Leopard continues as Apple has released a new statement concerning the availability of ZFS in Leopard. So, let's recap: in April 2006, Apple expresses its interest in Sun's ZFS for the first time. After a first hint, the first screenshot popped up which showed ZFS on Leopard, followed by the definitive proof Leopard could create ZFS disk images. Fast forward six months, and Sun's Jonathan Schwartz announces that ZFS would be Leopard's default filesystem; a statement contradicted by an Apple official yesterday. In fact, this Apple official said ZFS would not be in Leopard at all. Then we arrive at today, and we have Apple stating that ZFS will in fact be included as a limited option in Leopard, only from the command line, read-only. Let's see what tomorrow will bring.
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Member since:
2005-07-06
rdiff-backup is pretty similar and has been available on Unix machines for some time. Actually it's awesome software, the guy who wrote it is a very smart chap. Features (that I can remember):
* maintains a mirror-style backup of most recent backed-up copy, which you can access directly as normal files
* point-in-time recovery of file data
* trim history to reduce space usage
* older copies described by reverse diffs relative to the mirror
* handles hard links, xattrs, permissions, etc
* when backing up between filesystems with different capabilities it tries to record all data from the origin, even if the backup FS has less / different features
* you can hard link to revisions in the mirror, and the hard links will continue to point to that revision even when the mirror is updated (works because rdiff-backup unlinks the mirror files then creates new ones in its place)
Basically, it's like an advanced command-line copy of time machine. It lacks a pretty GUI for browsing revisions and / or a FUSE filesystem to access the history. The same guy also wrote duplicity, which does a similar thing but to an untrusted backup server (using gpg, checksums, etc to provide security and detect tampering)