On Fri, 2006-03-24 at 15:02 +0000, Daniel Watts wrote:
I've been thinking of some kind of compressed archive system too. Every night messages older than x days are compressed and added to an archive on a slower, less expensive, but larger storage location (eg over NFS).
The user has access to a folder called "Archive" that, when requestsed, is decompressed and served up. It is presented in such a way that the user knows this is a slower storage format. eg may be they do a two step process of "Mounting Archive" then "Access Archive". I'd expect Mounting to take up to 60 seconds.
Then you can offer larger quotas on the Archive filesystem and keep the primary mail system empty, quick and responsive.
I haven't progressed to the stage where I've thought how one would actually go about this. Work out what you want it to look like from the user's perspective first and then work backwards to find out what you need to do to make that happen.
Hmm, why not simply use a compressed filesystem for the archive? That way the (de)compression is completely transparent to the user and the effort to set this up is absolutely minimal.
IIRC squashfs can do this, but my last contact with that fs has been a long time ago.
Regards
Udo Rader
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