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.

Storage Checkpoints provide:

Storage Checkpoints are actually data objects that are managed and controlled by the file system. You can create, remove, and rename Storage Checkpoints because they are data objects with associated names.

See How a Storage Checkpoint works.

Unlike a disk-based mirroring technology that requires a separate storage space, Storage Checkpoints minimize the use of disk space by using a Storage Checkpoint within the same free space available to the file system.

After you create a Storage Checkpoint of a mounted file system, you can also continue to create, remove, and update files on the file system without affecting the logical image of the Storage Checkpoint. A Storage Checkpoint preserves not only the name space (directory hierarchy) of the file system, but also the user data as it existed at the moment the file system image was captured.

You can use a Storage Checkpoint in many ways. For example, you can use them to: