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Fast Recovery

Because the main design goal of D-GRAID is to ensure higher availability, fast recovery from failure is also critical. The most straightforward optimization available with D-GRAID is to recover only ``live'' file system data. Assume we are restoring data from a live mirror onto a hot spare; in the straightforward approach, D-GRAID simply scans the source disk for live blocks, examining appropriate file system structures to determine which blocks to restore. This process is readily generalized to more complex redundancy encodings. D-GRAID can potentially prioritize recovery in a number of ways, e.g., by restoring certain ``important'' files first, where importance could be domain specific (e.g., files in /etc) or indicated by users in a manner similar to the hoarding database in Coda [27].



Muthian Sivathanu 2004-02-17