Business entities and consumers are storing an ever increasing amount of digitized data. For example, many commercial entities are in the process of digitizing their business records and/or other data. Similarly, web based service providers generally engage in transactions that are primarily digital in nature. Thus, techniques and mechanisms that facilitate efficient and cost effective storage of vast amounts of digital data are being implemented. For example, a cluster network environment may be implemented as a data storage system that facilitates the storage, retrieval, and/or processing of data.
Backup schedules, data replication services, versioning control, and/or data restoration policies may be implemented to mitigate unrecoverable data loss that may otherwise result from hardware failures, such as a data storage device failure, and/or software failures. For example, a cluster network environment may implement a data replication task that may copy and store data across a plurality of nodes within the cluster network environment. In case of a node failure and/or data loss, one or more nodes within the cluster network environment may comprise replicated data of the failed node that may otherwise have been permanently lost.
Current backup and restore techniques may be implemented at a system-wide level, a volume level, an application level, and/or a manual user level. In one example, a data storage system may implement a backup schedule to copy data from primary data storage devices to secondary data storage devices. For example, the data may be backed up as volume snapshots. Volume snapshots provide for the creation of backup snapshots of data at a volume level. In another example, a text editor application may store backup data of text documents, which may be used to restore the text documents within the text editor application. In another example, a user may merely copy an original file as a backup file.
Many backup and restore techniques provide file backup by creating an entire copy of the data. As user data grows, replicating an entire set of data may be an inefficient use of resources (e.g., processing time, storage space, etc.). In addition, many applications may provide backup and restore features through the application's user interface. However, backups created by the application may be accessible merely through the application user interface, and may be restricted by specific conditions and policies of the application. Thus, a user may be unable to navigate a file structure to access and/or manage the backups (e.g., the user may be unable to view and/or perform backup/restore commands). Unfortunately, current backup and restore techniques may not provide file level backup management that may be accessible to users through a file structure. Additionally, currently volume level backup techniques may be limited with respect to a number of snapshots that may be made of a volume.