Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

ext3cow is released

This is really cool. Currently they have a release for the 2.6.20.3 kernel. The funding for this project appears to have come from a Dept. of Energy grant.

From the website:

Ext3cow is an open-source, versioning file system based on ext3.  It provides a time-shifting interface that allows a real-time and continuous view of the past.  This allows users to access their file system as it appeared at any point in time.

Ext3cow was designed as a platform for regulatory compliance, and has been used to implement secure deletion, authenticated encryption, and incremental authentication. 

Some advantages of ext3cow:

• It does not pollute the name space with named versions
• It has low storage and performance overhead
• It is totally modular, requiring no changes to kernel or VFS interfaces