LvFS: A Lightweight File Versioning Tool for General Binary Files

Abstract

Current source code version control systems can deal with the multiple versions of files containing text content such as source code or plain text. However, it needs a general tool for the versioning control for binary files such as office documents. The multiple version file systems can handle the file system versioning in general. But they are difficult to implement as sitting in the kernel level. They make multiple versions for all files, which is usually not necessary. This paper proposes LvFS, a lightweight file version tool, to handle the multi-version files. LvFS is a user level application. LvFS embraces the FUSE interface to tracking the modifications of files and store the modifications in a separate file. LvFS can keep the multiple versions of a general binary file to keep low performance overhead.