CopyOnWrite 0.1.1

This library provides a .NET layer on top of OS-specific logic that provides copy-on-write linking for files (a.k.a. CoW, file cloning, or reflinking). CoW linking provides the ability to copy a file without actually copying the original file's bytes from one disk location to another. The filesystem is in charge of ensuring that if the original file is modified or deleted, the CoW linked files remain unmodified by lazily copying the original file's bytes into each link. Unlike symlinks or hardlinks, writes to CoW links do not write through to the original file, as the filesystem breaks the link and copies in a lazy fashion. This enables scenarios like file caches where a single copy of a file held in a content-addressable or other store is safely linked to many locations in a filesystem with low I/O overhead.

This library allows a .NET developer to:

• Discover whether CoW links are allowed between two filesystem paths,
• Discover whether CoW links are allowed for a directory tree based at a specific root directory,
• Create CoW links.
• Find filesystem CoW link limits.

Discovery is important, as different operating systems and different filesystems available for those operating systems provide varying levels of CoW link support:

• Windows: The default NTFS filesystem does NOT support CoW, but the ReFS filesystem does.
• Linux: Btrfs, Xfs, Zfs support CoW while ext4 does not.
• Mac: AppleFS supports CoW by default.

When using this library you may need to create a wrapper that copies the file if CoW is not available.

Example

using Microsoft.CopyOnWrite;

ICopyOnWriteFilesystem cow = CopyOnWriteFilesystemFactory.GetInstance();
bool canCloneInCurrentDirectory = cow.CopyOnWriteLinkSupportedInDirectoryTree(Environment.CurrentDirectory);
if (canCloneInCurrentDirectory)
{
    cow.CloneFile(existingFile, cowLinkFilePath);
}

Release History

• 0.1.1 October 2021: Bug fixes for Windows. Mac and Linux throw NotSupportedException.
• 0.1.0 July 2021: Windows ReFS support. Mac and Linux throw NotSupportedException.