Snapshot (computer storage)
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In computer systems, a snapshot is the state of a system at a particular point in time. The term was coined as an analogy to that in photography.
Rationale
A full
One
To avoid downtime, high-availability systems may instead perform the backup on a snapshot—a
Implementations
Volume managers
Some
Some volume managers also allow creation of writable snapshots, extending the copy-on-write approach by disassociating any blocks modified within the snapshot from their "parent" blocks in the original volume. Such a scheme could be also described as performing additional copy-on-write operations triggered by the writes to snapshots.
On Linux, Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows creation of both read-only and read-write snapshots. Writable snapshots were introduced with the LVM version 2 (LVM2).[1]
File systems
Some file systems, such as
EMC's Isilon OneFS clustered storage platform implements a single scalable file system that supports read-only snapshots at the file or directory level. Any file or directory within the file system can be snapshotted and the system will implement a copy-on-write or point-in-time snapshot dynamically based on which method is determined to be optimal for the system.
On Linux, the
See also
- Apple File System § Snapshots
- Application checkpointing
- Persistence (computer science)
- Sandbox (computer security)
- Storage Hypervisor
- System image
- Virtual machine
Notes
- ^ WAFL is not a file system. WAFL is a file layout that provides mechanisms that enable a variety of file systems and technologies that want to access disk blocks.
References
- ^ "LVM HOWTO". 3.8. Snapshots. tldp.org. Retrieved 2013-09-29.
- ^ "Optimized Storage Solution for Enterprise Scale Hyper-V Deployments" (PDF). Microsoft. March 2010. p. 15. Retrieved 25 October 2012.
External links
- Garimella, Neeta (2006-04-26). "Understanding and exploiting snapshot technology for data protection, Part 1: Snapshot technology overview". IBM.
- Harwood, Mike (2003-09-24). "Storage Basics: Backup Strategies".