Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Advanced Features Administrator"s Guide (5900-1503, April 2011)

Administering Storage

Checkpoints

This chapter includes the following topics:

■ About Storage Checkpoints

■ Operation of a Storage Checkpoint

■ Types of Storage Checkpoints

■ Storage Checkpoint administration

■ Storage Checkpoint space management considerations

■ Restoring from a Storage Checkpoint

■ Storage Checkpoint quotas

About Storage Checkpoints

Veritas File System (VxFS) provides a Storage Checkpoint feature that quickly

creates a persistent image of a file system at an exact point in time. Storage

Checkpoints significantly reduce I/O overhead by identifying and maintaining

only the file system blocks that have changed since the last Storage Checkpoint

or backup via a copy-on-write technique.

See “Copy-on-write” on page 271.

Storage Checkpoints provide:

■ Persistence through reboots and crashes.

■ The ability for data to be immediately writeable by preserving the file system

metadata, the directory hierarchy, and user data.

Chapter