As I'm sure you've already discovered, you can't create a hard link to a file in a snapshot. The reason is that snapshots are read-only, but it is necessary to increment the number of links in the linked-to inode. You can use a symbolic link, of course, but it would point to whatever was at that location. To prevent the snapshot from being recycled, you could do a "snap rename" of hourly.0 or whatever to something else.
Mark
-----Original Message----- From: Jim Harm harm1@llnl.gov To: toasters@mathworks.com toasters@mathworks.com Date: Thursday, November 05, 1998 8:56 AM Subject: hard link .snapshot files
We have the need to occasionally recover a LARGE file and we would like to recover it quickly without making the massive increase in space usage that would result if we merely copied the file from .snapshot to the old
directory.
Can we build a hard link from the old directory to the .snapshot/hourly.#/Large.file and how will that be protected with the next snapshot?
I don't want to screw anything up. Our users ARE rocket scientists.
}}}===============>> LLNL James E. Harm (Jim); jharm@llnl.gov (925) 422-4018 Page: 423-7705x57152
No. I want to "move" a file from .snapshot to regular directory. The file is too big to fit with a copy without removing it from .snapshot. Is there some way to relink a file that has been erased? The lady at the NetApp admin class said "yes". The support line said "yes". But, ... Noone has given me a command or instructions that have succeeded.
Some people said to just copy it; NetApp box will know the file blocks exist and just link the same blocks to the new file; Nooo.
Some people said to relink it, but you're correct; it would then be read only. If it's a 9 GB file on a 15 GB system. There is no room to copy it. If it was sparse, I could dd it.
At 10:44 AM -0800 11/5/98, Mark Muhlestein wrote:
As I'm sure you've already discovered, you can't create a hard link to a file in a snapshot. The reason is that snapshots are read-only, but it is necessary to increment the number of links in the linked-to inode. You can use a symbolic link, of course, but it would point to whatever was at that location. To prevent the snapshot from being recycled, you could do a "snap rename" of hourly.0 or whatever to something else.
Mark
-----Original Message----- From: Jim Harm harm1@llnl.gov To: toasters@mathworks.com toasters@mathworks.com Date: Thursday, November 05, 1998 8:56 AM Subject: hard link .snapshot files
We have the need to occasionally recover a LARGE file and we would like to recover it quickly without making the massive increase in space usage that would result if we merely copied the file from .snapshot to the old
directory.
Can we build a hard link from the old directory to the .snapshot/hourly.#/Large.file and how will that be protected with the next snapshot?
I don't want to screw anything up. Our users ARE rocket scientists.
}}}===============>> LLNL James E. Harm (Jim); jharm@llnl.gov (925) 422-4018 Page: 423-7705x57152
}}}===============>> LLNL James E. Harm (Jim); jharm@llnl.gov (925) 422-4018 Page: 423-7705x57152
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Jim Harm -
Mark Muhlestein