Epic: Full Workspace Backup

[svenefftinge]

Currently only the /workspace folder is backed up and preserved across workspace restarts, and from the prebuild. This is unintuitive, adds friction to the experience and is a source of issues for users.

The change to keep all workspace files is very core and should be available in all forms of the product: SaaS and Self-Hosted.

To make this happen there are a few technical challenges that we will need to solve first, particularly as self-hosted support that may use older kernel and containerd versions is required.

Notes from June 23, 2022

• The biggest blocker we found was not the workdir location [related PR], but the interaction between overlayfs and shiftfs. TL;DR docker becomes unworkably slow if it needs to run on this setup because it falls back to VFS
• idmapped mounts may be a solution, but they require recent Kernel versions which is a problem for self-hosted

[axonasif]

Anything on this yet?

[mteam88]

still waiting for development...

[purkhusid]

Will this allow prebuilds to be bigger than 30gb?

[shaal]

Would this affect Snapshots feature?
(If yes, how can we avoid exposing things like private ssh key file at ~/.ssh/id_rsa)

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[shaal]

Is there any update on this issue?

[sagor999]

This is superseded by this epic: #790
@atduarte should this one be closed now?

[atduarte]

I thought full workspace backup was out of scope for #7901 [1] and that the PVC would only contain the /workspace folder 🤔

If #7901 solves this, I would leave this open as an issue but reference the durability epic.

[sagor999]

@atduarte you are right, it is indeed out of scope for that epic. I got confused a bit here. 😅

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[a-b]

I'm wondering if some workaround is possible. What if we link folders like /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew to /workspace? Perhaps this could have some reflection in .gitopod.yml ?