article

Ext3cow: a time-shifting file system for regulatory compliance

Authors:

Zachary Peterson,

Randal BurnsAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS), Volume 1, Issue 2

Pages 190 - 212

https://doi.org/10.1145/1063786.1063789

Published: 01 May 2005 Publication History

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.

References

[1]

Azagury, A., Factor, M. E., and Satran, J. 2002. Point-in-time copy: Yesterday, today and tomorrow. In Proceedings of the Tenth Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies. 259--270.]]

[2]

Batten, C., Barr, K., Saraf, A., and Trepetin, S. 2002. pStore: A secure peer-to-peer backup system. Technical memo MIT-LCS-TM-632. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA.]]

[3]

Boneh, D. and Lipton, R. 1996. A revocable backup system. In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Security Symposium. 91--96.]]

Digital Library

[4]

Bryant, R., Forester, R., and Hawkes, J. 2002. Filesystem performance and scalability in Linux 2.4.17. In Proceedings of the FREENIX Track: 2002 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. 259--274.]]

Digital Library

[5]

Card, R., Ts'o, T. Y., and Tweedie, S. 1994. Design and implementation of the second extended file system. In Proceedings of the 1994 Amsterdam Linux Conference.]]

[6]

Cederqvist et al., P. 2003. Version Management with CVS. Network Theory Limited. Web site: http://www.network-theory.co.uk/cvs/manual/.]]

[7]

Chervenak, A., Vellanki, V., and Kurmas, Z. 1998. Protecting file systems: A survey of backup techniques. In Proceedings of the Joint NASA and IEEE Mass Storage Conference.]]

[8]

Chutani, S., Anderson, O. T., Kazar, M. L., Leverett, B. W., Mason, W. A., and Sidebotham, R. N. 1992. The Episode file system. In Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1992 Technical Conference (San Fransisco, CA). 43--60.]]

[9]

Cornell, B., Dinda, P. A., and Bustamante, F. E. 2004. Wayback: A user-level versioning file system for Linux. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, FREENIX Track. 19--28.]]

Digital Library

[10]

Digital Equipment Corporation. 1985. Vax/VMS System Software Handbook.]]

[11]

EMC Corporation 1998. EMC TimeFinder Product Description Guide. EMC Corporation, Hopkinton, MA. Web site: http://www.emc.com.]]

[12]

Gifford, D. K., Needham, R. M., and Schroeder, M. D. 1988. The Cedar file system. Commun. ACM 31, 3 (Mar.), 288--298.]]

Digital Library

[13]

Green, R. J., Baird, A. C., and Christopher, J. 1996. Designing a fast, on-line backup system for a log-structured file system. Dig. Tech. J. 8, 2, 32--45.]]

Digital Library

[14]

Grune, D., Berliner, B., and Polk, J. 2003. Concurrent versioning system (CVS). Web site: http://www.cvshome.org/.]]

[15]

Gutmann, P. 1996. Secure deletion of data from magnetic and solid-state memory. In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Security Symposium. 77--90.]]

Digital Library

[16]

Hagerty, J. 2004. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance spending will exceed &dollar;5b in 2004. AMR Research Outlook. Web site: http://www.amrresearch.com.]]

[17]

Hagman, R. 1987. Reimplementing the Cedar file system using logging and group commit. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP). 155--162.]]

Digital Library

[18]

Hitachi, Ltd. 2001. Hitachi ShadowImage. Hitachi, Ltd., Tokyo, Japan. Web site: http://www.hitachi.com.]]

[19]

Hitz, D., Lau, J., and Malcom, M. 1994. File system design for an NFS file server appliance. In Proceedings of the USENIX San Francisco 1994 Winter Conference.]]

Digital Library

[20]

Howard, J. H., Kazar, M. L., Menees, S. G., Nichols, D. A., Satyanarayanan, M., Sidebotham, R. N., and West, M. J. 1988. Scale and performance in a distributed file system. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 6, 1 (Feb.), 51--81.]]

Digital Library

[21]

Hutchinson, N. C., Manley, S., Federwisch, M., Harris, G., Hitz, D., Kleiman, S., and O'Malley, S. 1999. Logical vs. physical file system backup. In 3rd Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation Proceedings (OSDI). 239--250.]]

Digital Library

[22]

Johnson, J. E. and Laing, W. A. 1996. Overview of the Spiralog file system. Dig. Tech. J. 6, 1, 51--81.]]

Digital Library

[23]

Killbridge, P. 2003. The cost of HIPAA compliance. New England J. Med. 348, 15, 1423--1424.]]

[24]

Kleiman, S. R. 1986. Vnodes: An architecture for multiple file system in SUN UNIX. In Proceedings of the 1986 USENIX Summer Technical Conference. 238--247.]]

[25]

MacDonald, J. P., Hilfinger, P. N., and Semenzato, L. 1998. PRCS: The project revision control system. In Proceedings of System Congifuration Management. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1439, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany.]]

Digital Library

[26]

McCoy, K. 1990. VMS File System Internals. Digital Press, Burlington, MA.]]

Digital Library

[27]

McKusick, M. K. 2002. Running “fsck” in the background. In Proceedings of the BSDCon 2002 Conference. 55--64.]]

[28]

McKusick, M. K., Bostic, K., Karels, M. J., and Quarterman, J. S. 1996. The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System. Addison Wesley, Reading, MA.]]

Digital Library

[29]

McKusick, M. K. and Ganger, G. 1999. Soft updates: A technique for eliminating most synchronous writes in the fast filesystem. In Freenix Track at the Annual USENIX Technical Conference. 1--17.]]

Digital Library

[30]

McKusick, M. K., Joy, W. N., Leffler, J., and Fabry, R. S. 1984. A fast file system for UNIX. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 2, 3 (Aug.), 181--197.]]

Digital Library

[31]

Morris, J. H., Satyanarayanan, M., Conner, M. H., Howard, J. H., Rosenthal, D. S. H., and Smith, F. D. 1986. Andrew: A distributed personal computing environment. Commun. ACM 29, 3 (Mar.), 184--201.]]

Digital Library

[32]

Moses, L. 1982. An introductory guide to TOPS-20. Tech. rep. TM-82-22, USC/Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Ray, CA. Web site: http://www.isi.edu.]]

[33]

Muniswamy-Reddy, K.-K., Wright, C. P., Himmer, A., and Zadok, E. 2004. A versatile and user-oriented versioning file system. In Proceedings of the Third USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). 115--128.]]

Digital Library

[34]

Osman, S., Subhraveti, D., Su, G., and Nieh, J. 2002. The design and implementation of zap: A system for migrating computing environments. In Proceedings of the Fifth Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). 361--376.]]

Digital Library

[35]

Patterson, H., Manley, S., Federwisch, M., Hitz, D., Kleiman, S., and Owara, S. 2002. SnapMirror: File system based asynchronous mirroring for disaster recovery. In Proceedings of the Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). 117--129.]]

Digital Library

[36]

Peterson, Z. N. J., Burns, R., and Stubblefield, A. 2004. Limiting liability in a federally compliant file system. In Proceedings of the PORTIA Workshop on Sensitive Data in Medical, Financial, and Content Distribution Systems.]]

[37]

Presotto, D. 1992. Plan 9. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Micro-Kernels and Other Kernel Architectures. 31--38.]]

Digital Library

[38]

Quinlan, S. 1991. A cached worm file system. Softw.---Pract. Exper. 21, 12 (Dec.), 1289--1299.]]

Digital Library

[39]

Quinlan, S. and Dorward, S. 2002. Venti: A new approach to archival storage. In Proceedings of the 2002 Conference on File And Storage Technologies (FAST). 89--101.]]

Digital Library

[40]

Rochkind, M. J. 1975. The source code control system. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 1, 4 (Dec.), 364--370.]]

[41]

Roselli, D. and Anderson, T. E. 1996. Characteristics of file system workloads. Research rep., University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.]]

Digital Library

[42]

Rosenblum, M. and Ousterhout, J. K. 1992. The design and implementation of a log-structured file system. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst. 10, 1 (Feb.), 26--52.]]

Digital Library

[43]

Sandberg, R., Goldberg, D., Kleiman, S., Walsh, D., and Lyon, B. 1985. Design and implementation of the Sun network file system. In Proceedings of the Summer USENIX Conference Proceedings. 119--130.]]

[44]

Santry, D. J., Feeley, M. J., Hutchinson, N. C., Veitch, A. C., Carton, R. W., and Ofir, J. 1999. Deciding when to forget in the Elephant file system. In Proceedings of 17th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). 110--123.]]

Digital Library

[45]

Schroeder, M. D., Gifford, D. K., and Needham, R. M. 1985. A caching file system for a programmer's workstation. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). 25--34.]]

Digital Library

[46]

Seltzer, M., Bostic, K., McKusick, M. K., and Staelin, C. 1993. An implementation of a log-structured file system for UNIX. In Proceedings of the Winter 1993 USENIX Conference (San Diego, CA, Jan. 25--29).]]

Digital Library

[47]

Shapiro, J. S. and Vanderburgh, J. 2002. CPCMS: A configuration management system based on cryptographic names. In Freenix Track at the Annual the Annual USENIX Technical Conference. 203--216.]]

Digital Library

[48]

Smith, K. A. and Seltzer, M. I. 1997. File system aging---increasing the relevance of file system benchmarks. In Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGMETRICS Conference. 203--213.]]

Digital Library

[49]

Soules, C. A. N., Goodson, G. R., Strunk, J. D., and Ganger, G. R. 2003. Metadata efficiency in versioning file systems. In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies. 43--58.]]

Digital Library

[50]

Strunk, J. D., G. R. Goodson, M. L. S., Soules, C. A. N., and Ganger, G. R. 2000. Self-securing storage: Protecting data in compromised systems. In Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI). 165--180.]]

Digital Library

[51]

Sun Microsystems. 1989. NFS: Network file system protocol specification. Network Working Group, Request for Comments (RFC 1094), Version 2. Go to http://www.fags.org/rfcs/rfc/094.html.]]

Digital Library

[52]

Tannenbaum, A. S. 1987. Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, NJ.]]

Digital Library

[53]

Tichy, W. F. 1985. RCS: A system for version control. Softw.---Pract. Exper. 15, 7 (July), 637--654.]]

Digital Library

[54]

Ts'o, T. Y. and Tweedie, S. 2002. Planned extensions to the Linux ext2/ext3 filesystem. In Freenix Track at the Annual USENIX Technical Conference. 235--243.]]

Digital Library

[55]

Zadok, E. and Bădulescu, I. 1999. A stackable file system interface for Linux. In LinuxExpo Conference Proceedings. 141--151.]]

Cited By

Zhan YConway AJiao YMukherjee NGroombridge IBender MFarach-Colton MJannen WJohnson RPorter DYuan J(2021)Copy-on-Abundant-Write for Nimble File System ClonesACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/342349517:1(1-27)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3423495
Zhan YConway AJiao YMukherjee NGroombridge IBender MFarach-Colton MJannen WJohnson RPorter DYuan JNoh SWelch B(2020)How to copy filesProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/3386691.3386699(75-90)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3386691.3386699
Yeh TWang YTu Y(2020)Maintaining data integrity in cloud systems through version managementInternational Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing10.1504/ijahuc.2020.10781834:2(63-73)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/ijahuc.2020.107818
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

BTRFS: The Linux B-Tree Filesystem

BTRFS is a Linux filesystem that has been adopted as the default filesystem in some popular versions of Linux. It is based on copy-on-write, allowing for efficient snapshots and clones. It uses B-trees as its main on-disk data structure. The design goal ...
An Efficient Memory-Mapped Key-Value Store for Flash Storage
SoCC '18: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing

Persistent key-value stores have emerged as a main component in the data access path of modern data processing systems. However, they exhibit high CPU and I/O overhead. Today, due to power limitations it is important to reduce CPU overheads for data ...
The zebra striped network file system

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Storage

ACM Transactions on Storage Volume 1, Issue 2

May 2005

143 pages

ISSN:1553-3077

EISSN:1553-3093

DOI:10.1145/1063786

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 May 2005

Published in TOS Volume 1, Issue 2

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

117
Total Citations
View Citations
1,623
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)23
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 08 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Zhan YConway AJiao YMukherjee NGroombridge IBender MFarach-Colton MJannen WJohnson RPorter DYuan J(2021)Copy-on-Abundant-Write for Nimble File System ClonesACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/342349517:1(1-27)Online publication date: 29-Jan-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3423495
Zhan YConway AJiao YMukherjee NGroombridge IBender MFarach-Colton MJannen WJohnson RPorter DYuan JNoh SWelch B(2020)How to copy filesProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies10.5555/3386691.3386699(75-90)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3386691.3386699
Yeh TWang YTu Y(2020)Maintaining data integrity in cloud systems through version managementInternational Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing10.1504/ijahuc.2020.10781834:2(63-73)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/ijahuc.2020.107818
Son YKim MKim SYeom HKim NHan H(2020)Design and Implementation of SSD-Assisted Backup and Recovery for Database SystemsIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2018.288446632:2(260-274)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TKDE.2018.2884466
Kim HYeom HSon Y(2020)An Efficient Database Backup and Recovery Scheme using Write-Ahead Logging2020 IEEE 13th International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD)10.1109/CLOUD49709.2020.00062(405-413)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/CLOUD49709.2020.00062
Ming MZhao GKuang XLiu LZhang R(2020)An Adaptive Data Protection Scheme for Optimizing Storage SpaceMachine Learning for Cyber Security10.1007/978-3-030-62460-6_22(250-260)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-62460-6_22
Yang CTao XZhao F(2019)Publicly verifiable data transfer and deletion scheme for cloud storageInternational Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks10.1177/155014771987899915:10(155014771987899)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2019
https://doi.org/10.1177/1550147719878999
Wang XYuan YZhou YCoats CHuang J(2019)Project AlmanacProceedings of the Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 201910.1145/3302424.3303983(1-16)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3302424.3303983
May MLaron EZoabi KGerhardt H(2019)On the Lifecycle of the FileACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/329546315:1(1-45)Online publication date: 18-Feb-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3295463
Li HXiao FXiong N(2019)Efficient Metadata Management in Block-Level CDP System for Cyber SecurityIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.29480977(151569-151578)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2948097
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents