Five Years of Btrfs
A question for HN: what filesystem and/or block-device abstraction layer would you use on a database server, if you wanted to perform scheduled incremental backups using filesystem-level consistent snapshotting and differential snapshot shipping to object storage, <i>instead of</i> using the DBMS’s own replication layer to achieve this effect? (I.e. you want disaster recovery, not high availability.)<p>Or, to put that another way: what are AWS and GCP using in their SANs (EBS; GCE PD) that allows them to take on-demand incremental snapshots of SAN volumes, and then ship those snapshots away from the origin node into safer out-of-cluster replicated storage (e.g. object storage)? It it proprietary, or is it just several FOSS technologies glued together?<p>My naive guess would be that the cloud hosts are either using ZFS volumes, or LVM LVs (which <i>do</i> have incremental snapshot capability, if the disk is created in a thin pool) under iSCSI. (Or they’re relying on whatever point-solution VMware et al sold them.)<p>If you control the filesystem layer (i.e. you don’t need to be filesystem-agnostic), would Btrfs snapshots be better for this same use-case?