A kind of Time Machine

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Tuesday, October 14. 2008

The Time Machine in Mac OS 10.5 saved my butt a few times in the last few months. Getting back an older version of a presentation when you´ve saved a short version of you presentation in the same file as the long version a few days earlier is quite handy. Solaris is now capable to do a similar thing (albeit the implementation is vastly different): Time Slider is based on periodic ZFS snapshots and presents them in a nice way:

Time slider is one of the new feature that will be available in OpenSolaris 2008.11.Time slider provides an automatic way to backup your data on the same disc using one of Sun's ZFS filesystem unique features, snapshots. With time slider you can browse and recover files from snapshot backups using the GNOME file manager.

When you click on the life buoy in the File Brower you get a slider to step back in time based on this snapshhhhhh ... wait ... just look at the screenshots at Erwann Chénedé's weblog. A picture substitutes 1000 words and this feature is outright incredible. Excellent work!

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Solaris at 19:58 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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, solaris

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, zfs

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You know, I kinda hate to say this, and I think it chimes in with the register post on taking Sun private.

I too earlier today saw this posting and immediately thought of time machine. The ZFS snapshots are probably way more efficient.

But and here is the kicker, the time machine implementation has been out there for at least year, it (and I'm not a mac fanboy here - i actually do Solaris administration for a living) looks fantastic, major eye (as well as fantastic feature) candy, which is/does shift copies of MacOS X.

Look at those screenshots you linked to, compare to time machine screenshots. I tell you the MacOS version just looks a 100 times snazzier.

I know, I know, looks are not everything, and you are right Sun has some great products out there - I kinda love thumper, but there do seem to be a lot of articles about Sun financial postion. And you guys made some dumb decisions in the mid 2000's - killing of solaris x86 then resurrecting - slaps forehead now.

cheers,

jason.

#1 jason arneil (Homepage) on 2008-10-14 22:08 (Reply)

I don´t think it will take too long, until someone takes the the stuff and creates the Timetunnel view with Compiz or something like that.

I´m a Mac user and i know the visuals of Time Machine are really cool. The problem ... it relies on the 3d graphic libraries of the MacOS 10.5 operating enviroment. You don´t have a 3d accelerator in the SunRay system, you don´t have a 3d accelerator in every supported hardware (for example an Ultra10 or Ultra 60 workstation). The way it´s done today dont exclude the user of system non-capable to compute parts of the GUI in the GPU.

#2 Joerg+M. (Homepage) on 2008-10-15 06:00 (Reply)

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