DATE: Thursday , March 20, 2003
TIME: Noon - 1 pm
PLACE: Hamerschlag Hall D-210

SPEAKER:
Craig Soules
Carnegie Mellon University

TITLE:
Metadata Efficiency in Versioning File Systems

ABSTRACT:
Versioning file systems retain earlier versions of modified files, allowing recovery from user mistakes or system corruption. Unfortunately, conventional versioning systems do not efficiently record large numbers of versions. In particular, versioned metadata can consume as much space as versioned data. This talk examines two space-efficient metadata structures for versioning file systems and describes their integration into the Comprehensive Versioning File System (CVFS), which keeps all versions of all files. Experiments with CVFS verify that its current version performance is similar to that of non-versioning file systems while reducing overall space needed for history data by a factor of two. Although access to historical versions is slower than conventional versioning systems, checkpointing is shown to mitigate and bound this effect.

BIO:
Craig Soules is a 3rd year graduate student in Computer Science who has been working on versioning file systems off and on for over 2 years. He hopes that after the completion of this talk he will be able to leave all that in the past and work on completing a thesis proposal. This talk is both a practice talk for an upcoming FAST presentation and (hopefully) fulfillment of his speaking requirement.

SDI / LCS Seminar Questions?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/