The problem#

I was running a Factorio multiplayer server and was being paranoid about making sure I didn't lose any save data. But I also didn't want to put the saves directory on my ZFS file system as it's on a hard drive, not an SSD, and saves taking too long can cause lag for the players (although with non-blocking saving this is much less of an issue).

The solution#

The following script watches the saves/ directory for any new files being written and immediately copies them to the ZFS dataset tank/factorio mounted at /tank/factorio/ and creates a snapshot named with the current date and time. The result is a snapshot corresponding to every time the game saved with the save data.

#!/bin/sh
while true
do
  inotifywait -r saves/ -e close_write
  sleep 0.1s  # write is to *.tmp.zip, wait for rename
  rsync -avhx saves/ /tank/factorio/
  now="$(date +%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S)"
  zfs snapshot tank/factorio@save-"$now"
done

The details#

The problem#

When developing code or creating visual artifacts in non-WYSIWYG systems, it is very useful to constantly be aware of the output of the compiler and the appearance of the artifact you are creating, whether it is a GUI, a chart, a graph, or a paper. The common way of doing this is to have an IDE specialized for the system you are using; for example, LyX provides a WYSIWYG editor for LaTeX. Similarly, there may be plugins for your text editor to support whatever kind of development you are doing. On the other hand, we can use the shell to create a solution independent of the text editor and the availability of plugins for the particular system being developed for.