For those of you that still don't know venti, I will say that it is a network storage system, heavily used in Plan 9 from Bell Labs and, thanks to Russ Cox, it is part of plan9port (Plan 9 from User Space), and hence it can be used in other operating systems.
Venti is a block storage server intended for archival data. In a Venti server, the SHA1 hash of a block’s contents acts as the block identifier for read and write operations. This approach enforces a write-once policy, preventing accidental or malicious destruction of data. In addition, duplicate copies of a block are coalesced, reducing the consumption of storage and simplifying the implementation of clients.
Venti is the system I use for back-ups of all our Linux machines at work; it is very easy to use, very efficient and very useful. The only problems I see is that it is not yet packaged in Debian, and its compilation and installation is not very straightforward; that is why I packaged it for Debian, creating 2 packages:
- venti-server: It includes the server (venti) and some utilities to create and configure it.
- venti-client: Some clients that talk to a venti server, such as vbackup, vac and vnfs.
I packaged version 20100416-1, but it is not published anywhere yet (but drop me a note if you would like to get it).
