misma - the minimal snapshot manager

misma is an open source application which maintains snapshots of one or more thin provisioned logical volumes on Linux systems.

Snapshots are created and removed automatically according to the configured schedule. Old snapshots are replaced so that the time between two consecutive snapshots doubles at each step. To prevent data or metadata space exhaustion, the available space of the underlying thin pools is monitored periodically and snapshots are removed early when space gets tight.

Besides the run subcommand which implements snapshot scheduling and free space monitoring, misma supports additional subcommands to list existing snapshots and the utilization of the thin pools, or to create/remove snapshots manually.

Installation

misma is easy to install and easy to configure. To build from source, a number of dependencies must be installed. The following should work on Debian/Ubuntu: 

	sudo apt-get install gcc git autoconf m4 make liblopsub-dev
	git clone https://git.tuebingen.mpg.de/misma
	cd misma
	./configure && make && sudo make install

Alternatively, download this pre-compiled static binary for x86, which should work fine on all Linux distributions.

Run misma help to display the subcommands and man misma for the manual page. The examples included in the manual illustrate how to create thin logical volumes and how to snapshot them with misma.

Resources