A Performance Analysis of System Rollback Techniques

Antônio Drumond Cota de Sousa; Henrique Cota de Freitas

doi:10.5753/sscad_estendido.2025.15828

Antônio Drumond Cota de Sousa PUC Minas
Henrique Cota de Freitas PUC Minas

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sscad_estendido.2025.15828

Resumo

System restorations are crucial for maintaining operational continuity, yet the lack of comparative performance data makes selecting the right rollback tool a significant challenge. This paper addresses this gap by conducting a quantitative performance analysis of four popular techniques: NixOS Generations, Snapper, Timeshift (in RSYNC mode), and Windows System Restore. We evaluated each tool based on two key metrics: rollback duration and snapshot storage size, using a controlled virtualized environment. Our results reveal significant performance disparities, with rollback speeds differing by up to a factor of four, indicating that filesystem-integrated, copy-on-write tools are demonstrably more efficient for performance-critical applications.

Referências

L. Cui, J. Li, T. Wo, B. Li, R. Yang, Y. Cao, and J. Huai. HotRestore: A fast restore system for virtual machine cluster. In 28th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA14), pages 10–25, Seattle, WA, Nov. 2014. USENIX Association. ISBN 978-1-931971-17-1. URL [link].

E. Dolstra and A. Löh. Nixos: a purely functional linux distribution. SIGPLAN Not., 43(9):367–378, Sept. 2008. ISSN 0362-1340. DOI: 10.1145/1411203.1411255.

C.-Y. Lin, S.-Y. Kuo, and Y. Huang. A checkpointing tool for palm operating system. In 2001 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, pages 71–76, 2001. DOI: 10.1109/DSN.2001.941392.

Linux Mint. Timeshift: A system restore tool for Linux. [link], 2025. Accessed: 2025-07-01.

Microsoft. Microsoft learn - volume shadow copy service (vss). [link], 2025. Accessed: 2025-06-06.

openSUSE. snapper: A tool for filesystem snapshot management. [link], 2025. Accessed: 2025-07-01.

O. Rodeh. B-trees, shadowing, and clones. TOS, 3, 02 2008. DOI: 10.1145/1326542.1326544.

O. Rodeh, J. Bacik, and C. Mason. Btrfs: The linux b-tree filesystem. ACM Trans. Storage, 9(3), Aug. 2013. ISSN 1553-3077. DOI: 10.1145/2501620.2501623.

The Linux man-pages project. vmstat(8) - Report virtual memory statistics. [link], 2025. Accessed: 2025-07-06.

A. Tridgell. rsync. [link], 2025. Accessed: 2025-06-10.

A. Tridgell and P. Mackerras. The rsync algorithm. Technical report, The Australian National University, 1996. URL [link]. Accessed: 2025-06-10.

H. Yang, Y. Yang, and Y. Tu. S3r5: A snapshot storage system based on row with rapid rollback, recovery and read-write. In 2019 IEEE 21st International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications; IEEE 17th International Conference on Smart City; IEEE 5th International Conference on Data Science and Systems (HPCC/SmartCity/DSS), pages 2111–2118, 2019. DOI: 10.1109/HPCC/SmartCity/DSS.2019.00292.

S.-M. Yun, A. Savoldi, P. Gubian, Y. Kim, S. Lee, and S. Lee. Design and implementation of a tool for system restore point analysis. In 2008 International Conference on Intelligent Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing, pages 542–546, 2008. DOI: 10.1109/IIH-MSP.2008.256.