On 04/07/10 12:06, Robert LeBlanc wrote (in bacula-users):
> So still thinking about this, is there any reason to not have a
> hierarchical file structure for disk based backup rather than a
> serialized stream? Here are my thought, any comments welcome to have a
> good discussion about this.
> 
> SD_Base_Dir
>     +- PoolA
>     +- PoolB
>             +- JobID1
>             +- JobID2
>                     +- Clientinfo.bacula (Bacula serial file that
> holds information similar to block header)
>                     +- Original File Structure (File structure from
> client is maintained and repeated here, allows for browsing of files
> outside of bacula)
>                              +- ClientFileA
>                              +- ClientFileA.bacula (Bacula serial file
> that holds information similar to the unix file attribute package)
>                              +- ClientFileB
>                              +- ClientFileB.bacula
>                              +- ClientDirA
>                              +- ClientDirA.bacula
> 
> Although it's great to reuse code, I think something like this would
> be very benifical to disk based backups. The would help increase dedup
> rates and some file systems like btrfs and ZFS may be able to take
> advantage of linked files (there has been some discussion on the btrfs
> list about things like this). This would also allow it to reside on
> any file system as all the ACL and information is being serialized in
> separate files which keeps unique data out of the blocks of possible
> duplicated data. I think we could even reuse a lot of the
> serialization code, so it would just differ in how it writes the
> stream of data.


After having thought about this a bit, I believe the idea has
significant merit.  Tape and disk differ significantly enough that there
is no conceptual reason not to have separate tape-specific and
disk-specific SDs.  So long as the storage logically looks the same from
the point of view of other daemons, the other daemons don't need to know
that the underlying storage architecture is different.  Creating a
hierarchical disk SD in this fashion that appears to the rest of Bacula
exactly the same as the existing FD does, and yet takes advantage of the
features offered by such an implementation, will not necessarily be a
trivial problem.  It's a pretty major project and, if approved, wouldn't
happen right away.

The major problem I see at the moment, architecturally speaking, is that
at the present time, this would break both migration and copy jobs
between volumes on the new disk-only SD and volumes of any kind on the
traditional SD, because Bacula does not yet support copy or migration
between different SDs.  At this time, both source and destination
devices are required to be on the same SD.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric AT caerllewys DOT net   alaric AT metrocast DOT net   phil AT 
co.ordinate DOT org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.

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