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Explicit TFS (Translucent File-System) - Is it possible ?


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#1 dossi

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Posted 30 October 2008 - 10:16 AM

Hi all.

After perusing the forum for quite a while now (before my recent sign-up).

I'm still looking for a _simple_ (sic!) and efficient approach to realize a TFS-like setup.

Concept:

Arbitrarily sized HDD connected to (in this case) Windows, open _RAW_Device or _RAW_filesystem [=DEV_SRC] as ImDisk-Device and having mandatory RO-Mode with WRITES being mapped to a distinct file [=DEV_TGT] located elsewhere (other drive/device) and subsequent reads to modified sectors [from DEV_SRC] being overloaded by the buffered/redirected writes in DEV_TGT.

AFAIK there exists the possibility of mapping the device to virtual memory, providing similar results, BUT: considering 500 GB Disks, I don't think _that_ will really work.

Is there a simple, efficient and quick means (short of re-writing the "offending section" on my own) to realize this TFS-like approach ?

I have seen quite a few pointers in that direction, but no explicit HOWTO (which is the main issue to me).

Thanks in advance,

/dossi

#2 was_jaclaz

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Posted 30 October 2008 - 11:58 AM

Not as far as i know. :cheers:

There are a couple of "new kids on the block" on the "listing" I recently added:
http://www.boot-land...?showtopic=1507
that also have a SDK.

but no feedback yet by any of the developers around. :cheers:

As well, there is this thingy here:
http://www.boot-land...?showtopic=5116
and as well it provoked no reactions in the community. :cheers:

jaclaz

#3 dossi

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Posted 30 October 2008 - 12:06 PM

Hm. That's about the same impression I've gotten till now *sigh*

On the other hand, the "Dokan"-thingy "looks nice" - if it's feasible to get it to work in a "heavy-duty"-environment is a completely other issue. I'll look at that, maybe it'll help.

ImDisk, on the other hand, simply _does_ what I want (most of the time, that is :cheers: ), so I'd actually _love_ to see this integrated into the whole concept.

/dossi

#4 Olof Lagerkvist

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Posted 24 November 2008 - 07:57 AM

... sorry to be pesky about it ... but, ... ehrm ...

TFS ? (*grin*)

This is an interesting idea and is something I have myself thought would be useful. There have also been a few request for this from various companies who are about to set up for example backup solutions based on this. Unfortunately they have all lost interest before I got any chance to start implementing it which means that my own priority for it falls down to the level where I do it when I really need it for any of my own projects.

But the good news is that your idea would be reasonably easy to do as a user-mode application which the ImDisk driver could communicate with. Everything necessary for supporting that is already there and there is a sample service application called 'devio' in the source package. This application responds to I/O messages such as "read 2048 bytes from position 512" etc. It would probably take a while until I could start on this project so I would suggest that anyone with some experience in TCP/IP programming in user-mode would probably do it faster...

Thanks for your interest in ImDisk anyway! :)




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