openstack team mailing list archive

[Vishvananda Ishaya <vishvananda@xxxxxxxxx>]

Can we clarify this a bit?

I see there are two functionalities:

backup / restore

this allows you to do an in place backup of an object, restore brings back the state in place

(internally the backup can be local or remote, but for effeciency would probably be something like a difference image)

snapshot / clone

this allows you to take the object and save its state.  You can't restore the object in place, but you can create a new object that is a clone of the old object.

Does this functionality line up with with what you are suggesting?

i think in general there should be a way to turn a backup into a snapshot as well, so you could create a new object from a backup

Vish

On Jul 20, 2011, at 12:01 PM, Chuck Thier wrote:

> At the last developers summit, it was noted by many, that the idea of
> a volume snaphsot in the cloud is highly overloaded.  EBS uses the
> notion of snapshots for making point in time backups of a volume that
> can be used to create a new volume from.  These are not true snapshots
> though from a storage world view.  Because of this I would like to
> make the following proposal:
> 
> Add a backup API to the Openstack API for Nova Volume.  This is to
> provide EBS style snapshot functionality in the Openstack API.  I'm
> proposing to name it backup instead of snapshot as that seems to
> better describe what is happening.  It also allows room for other
> storage backends to expose real snapshot capabilities down the road.
> 
> In the case of Lunr, we would be making backups of volumes to swift
> (possibly abstracted through glance in the future).
> 
> I have started a blueprint and spec at:
> 
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/backups-api
> http://etherpad.openstack.org/volume-backup
> 
> Please feel free to comment and contribute.
> 
> --
> Chuck
> 
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