Ext3cow: a time-shifting file system for regulatory compliance

  • Authors:

  • Zachary Peterson;Randal Burns

  • Affiliations:

  • Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD;Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS)
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The ext3cow file system, built on the popular ext3 file system, provides an open-source file versioning and snapshot platform for compliance with the versioning and audtitability requirements of recent electronic record retention legislation. Ext3cow provides a time-shifting interface that permits a real-time and continuous view of data in the past. Time-shifting does not pollute the file system namespace nor require snapshots to be mounted as a separate file system. Further, ext3cow is implemented entirely in the file system space and, therefore, does not modify kernel interfaces or change the operation of other file systems. Ext3cow takes advantage of the fine-grained control of on-disk and in-memory data available only to a file system, resulting in minimal degradation of performance and functionality. Experimental results confirm this hypothesis; ext3cow performs comparably to ext3 on many benchmarks and on trace-driven experiments.