Lazycoder

Journaled filesystems and SCM

Scott on Writing

Scott ponders:

On a tangent, does anyone want to wager how long it will be before tools like Vault are just a built-in part of the operating system’s file system? That is, anytime any file is changed, an old version is saved to some database, thereby giving a user the ability to easily say, ìRestore file X as it was on December 14, 2003, 11:35 am.î With hard drive capacities showing no end in sight, it seems like this would be feasible in the near future, if not today.

hmmm, isn’t that kind of the point of a journaling file system. e.g. ext3 or ReiserFS or the BeOS filesystem?

Maybe you can’t “rollback” and journaled filesystem. I don’t know of any way in CLI to rollback a file commit. I know the file writes in a journaled filesystem are atomic. Maybe there is someway to log the file system commits and roll them back programatically?

interesting points of research. Here’s a link that explains how ReiserFS works. From the link, it looks like the main purpose of a journaled file system is to handle crashes gracefully without corrupting the file system and to handle small and large files efficiently.