[Gluster-users] Turning GlusterFS into something else (was Re: how well will this work)

[Whit Blauvelt]

On Sun, Dec 30, 2012 at 05:12:04PM +0100, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:

> If I delete
> something on a disk that is far from being full it is just plain dumb to
> really erase this data from the disk. It won't help anyone. It will only hurt
> you if you deleted it accidently. Read my lips: free disk space is wasted
> space, just like free mem is wasted mem.
> And _that_ is the true reason for undelete. It won't hurt anybody, and will
> help some. And since it is the true goal of a fs to organise data on a drive
> it is most obvious that "undelete" (you may call it lazy-delete) is a very
> basic fs feature and _not_ an add-on patched onto it.

Stephan,

It's good to have a strong debater here like yourself. But you overlooked
Jeff's citing "compliance reasons." I don't know what sort of data you deal
in. But if it's anything financial, at all, there is serious jeopardy if
deleted files aren't really deleted. Much of it has both regulatory and
contractual requirements, plus potential legal liability. 

Yeah, I know parts of deleted files still often linger on the disk anyway.
But maintaining an index to those files, which would be what your request
would require, would put many of us in violation of these requirements in a
way that that simply does not. If a system is compromised, it's going to be
far easier for the compromiser to find deleted data if there's an available
index to it. It's far more work, and a far more obvious intrusion, if they
have to go sector-by-sector through the storage. 

Best,
Whit