Zackup, a scalable centralized backup service

The currently available open source, centralized to disk, backup services use a custom data storage structure to effectively store backup sets. While cus- tom data storage structures are necessary to store backup sets in differential or space efficient manner, they often lead to hard to navigate structures and increase the complexity of the backup service. To solve these problems a backup service was developed that relies on the Sun Microsystems, Inc. open sourced file system ZFS. With the variety of features ZFS includes, the major- ity of common tasks to create backup sets were delegated to the file system. Along with ZFS, a number of Ruby libraries were used to help further reduce the amount of author created code. Lastly to increase the scalability of the developed backup service a job queuing based communication architecture between service entities was employed allowing for a multiple backup node solution