Hi Thanatos,

On Fri, 21 May 2004 15:03:36 +1000, "Thanatos" <dgahan@europe.com>
wrote:
>Hope all this is of some help. It is POSSIBLE for someone to produce a
>system like you want - maintaining block indirection tables is all that's
>required - but the overheads in doing this locally on a Windows box given
>the nature of NTFS and FAT32 are very high.

Your post (not all of it shown here) makes a lot of sense to me.  If
I'm reading things correctly, your post describes the challenges of
making an "on-the-fly"/real-time filesystem snapshot.

For what it's worth, I personally do not have necessary requirement
for the real-time portion of the snapshot capability.  Rather, my main
focus is to save space for my disk-to-disk backups (mostly of just my
personal systems, but it could branch out into other things).  These
backups need not be performed in an automated fashion, nor must they
run in real time on a production system.  I'm happy to shut all my
data-access applications down, and run a backup "snapshot" for a
period of minutes to hours (probably a max of 2 hours, maybe more if I
stick to strickly running this at night).

My biggest problem is storage space.  My currently-sized 5-10GB
backups (that will soon be growing) end up eating up a lot of space on
my 120GB external drives each time I do a full-copy snapshot.  Since I
have no economic mechanism for incremental file-system snapshots, I
must copy over the entire directory structure every time.  I wish I
could get something that could do these incrementals on FAT32/NTFS and
thus dramatically reduce my storage capacity needs for my backup
retention disk media.  I care not if this is done real-time or
automatically; I just want to save storage space.

Does that change how one is to approach this?
-Matt
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