bdar: efficiently backup allocated bytes in file systems

[Zach Brown <zab@zabbo.net>]

So, I had a fun time throwing together a utility last weekend.  I
thought I'd share it sooner rather than later.

I found myself wanting to backup a copy of an ancient ~75g ext3 file
system.  I got frustrated by of our utilities which don't saturate
storage.  I wanted dd line rates but I also only wanted to copy
referenced data.

So I threw something together which does that.  I made it work roughly
like tar so that people have some idea what to expect.  So you can do
something like:

 $ bdar -cf - /dev/sda3 | gzip -c > /tmp/sda3-backup.bdar.gz
...
 $ zcat /tmp/sda3-backup.bdar.gz | bdar -xf - /dev/sda3

and it will do exactly what you would guess it would do after reading
those command lines.

The bdar file format is just a header and then a series of regions of
bytes described by their length and offset.  To create a bdar file from
a file system bdar needs to know enough to figure out what extents are
referenced.  Restoring a bdar is generic, though, it just stamps bytes
into the target file.

I only taught it the most basic knowledge of ext[234].  Just enough to
show that generating the bdar is ~4x faster than tar and ~2x faster than
dump :).  There's still some available disk bandwidth to consume with
read-ahead, but it's pretty close.  (single spindle, ~5g of kernel
trees, beefy cpus.)

I'm going to continue hacking this into something which could be trusted
with data but not on any rigorous schedule.  I thought I would put it up
for others to get a look at and, hopefully, contribute to.  There's a
lot of fun stuff we can do.

It's in a mercurial repo:

  http://www.zabbo.net/hg/bdar

  $ hg clone http://www.zabbo.net/hg/bdar ; ls ./bdar

Let me know if you give it a try, I'm interested in all feedback.

- z