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Ext3cow Versioning File System Released For 2.6
Zachary Peterson writes "Ext3cow, an open-source versioning file system based on ext3, has been released for the 2.6 Linux kernel. Ext3cow allows users to view their file system as it appeared at any point in time through a natural, time-shifting interface. This is can be very useful for revision control, intrusion detection, preventing data loss, and meeting the requirements of data retention legislation. See the link for kernel patches and details."
This might be far fetched but how far off is it to use these filesystems as a revision control system replacement ?
Never tinkered with any of these filesystems, but wouldnt it be very comfortable for at least us developers to have a filesystem that worked something like Subversion. Just hook up something on the network and use it as the central code repository.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
It reminds me of VMS file versions.
In VMS if you had a file named article.txt, each time you modified and saved it in editor, a new version was created named article.txt;1 article.txt;2 article.txt;3 and so forth. So after a long session of edit and saves you could end up with a hundred copies of file in your directory. A lot of clutter in the directory but easy access to older versions of the files.
With Ext2cow you basically get the same functionality in a bit different way. By default you see only article.txt file. If you need to access a previous version of the file you need to specify a cryptic code like this: article.txt@10233745. A bit cumbersome but, hey, how often you access older version of your file anyways. Looks better than VMS' approach.
This filesystem seems like a perfect solution for me as I am writing my Ph.D thesis. Currently I take backup every day and name it thesis20070420.tar.bz2, thesis200070421.tar.bz2, thesis20070422.tar.bz2 and so forth in case I need to go back and see how it looked some time ago.
However, in my home directory I have a lot of large audio and video files that I would never want to be versioned. I wander if Ext3cow keeps extra copies of the files if I move them around, change file named but do not modify the content. Probably I would have to make a new partition and put my text files I am working on there under Ext3cow and leave my media files on ext3.