openstack team mailing list archive

[Rostyslav Slipetskyy <rslipetskyy@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Let's say you're backing up a Nova instance to Swift every day using
> versioning, and each backup is 5gb.  After a few weeks, that hard
> drive may be storing over 100gb for one "file".  Swift has no way of
> taking that into account when placing files, so the distribution is
> going to get clumpy, like one drive might get full while another one
> is only half used.


I assume that in this scenario there is only one user/file of huge size and all 
the other users/files are much smaller (in other case, there will be not much 
difference in distribution among drives). But the suggested backup/recovery 
approach can work even in this scenario. If we have a configurable value that 
specifies maximum number of backups/versions, then in a setup where such a use 
case is possible, the max_file_backups value may be set to disallow backups at 
all (by default backups can be disabled). In other case, when OpenStack is used 
as a backend for let's say text documents, backups can be enabled and another 
cloud provider might benefit from this feature.

- Rostik