Cloning a Package or Individual Shares

A clone of a replicated package is a local, mutable project that can be managed like any other project on the system. The clone's shares are clones of the replicated shares at the most recently received snapshot. These clones share storage with their origin snapshots in the same way as clones of share snapshots do (see Cloning a Snapshot). This mechanism can be used to failover in the case of a catastrophic problem at the replication source, or simply to provide a local version of the data that can be modified.

Use the button in the BUI or the clone CLI command (in the package's context) to create a package clone based on the most recently received replication snapshot. Both the CLI and BUI interface require the administrator to specify a name for the new clone project and allow the administrator to override the mountpoint of the project or its shares to ensure that they don't conflict with those of other shares on the system.

In 2009.Q3 and earlier, cloning a replicated project was the only way to access its data and thus the only way to implement disaster-recovery failover. In 2010.Q1 and later, individual filesystems can be exported read-only without creating a clone. Additionally, replication packages can be directly converted into writable local projects as part of a failover operation. As a result, cloning a package is no longer necessary or recommended, as these alternatives provide similar functionality with simpler operations and without having to manage clones and their dependencies.

In particular, while a clone exists, its origin snapshot cannot be destroyed. When destroying the snapshot (possibly as a result of destroying the share, project, or replication package of which the snapshot is a member), the system warns administrators of any dependent clones which will be destroyed by the operation. Note that snapshots can also be destroyed on the source at any time and such snapshots are destroyed on the target as part of the subsequent replication update. If such a snapshot has clones, the snapshot will instead be renamed with a unique name (typically recv-XXX).

Administrators can also clone individual replicated share snapshots using the normal BUI and CLI interfaces.