ZFS, meet users, users, meet ZFS

One of the features that got me so exited about ZFS at the beginning was snapshots, and the way they were implemented to save space. I thought, this is how backups should had always work. I also wondered ways to expose this potential and capabilities to users.

In the latest months, Erwann Chenede, from the desktop team here at Sun has been working on a Nautilus extension to take advantage of these features:

This feature will hit OpenSolaris 2008.11 due for November this year. In the meantime, check Erwann's post to figure out where the code is.

Big kudos to Erwann and everyone involved!

 

Comments

[Alexandre]

So you finally implemented Seth Nickell's time machine that he proposed for GNOME ages ago :)

[Gordy]

Unfortunately, Seth forgot to invent ZFS to make it trivially-implementable :)

[Peter Gordon]

That, sir, is AWESOME. Keep up the great work, devs! :D

[David]

That's cool. Too bad ZFS isn't free software.

[Piotr Gaczkowski]

Any chance of making this cross-platform? We already have ZFS on *BSD and Linux. Same with Nautilus. Replacing the missing bits (SMF service?) shouldn't be too tough.

[Alberto Ruiz]

@David:

I'm sorry to dissapoint you ;-), but ZFS is free software and it's already present in other OSes than OpenSolaris such as FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

[Frank Denis]

One of the features that got me so exited about the HAMMER filesystem at the beginning was snapshots, and the way they were implemented to save space. I thought, this is how backups should had always work.

Hopefully this Nautilus hack will also get compatible with HAMMER.

[PierreS]

If I have, say a £D visualisation widget, ala coverflow, would it be possible to use the code to embed it in nautilus and make the widget interact with the chosen file ?

(I'm talking about this https://edge.launchpad.net/gloobus )