Copy-on-write folder? (Am not an admin)

Question

On Solaris, is there a way to make a "master folder" from which I can fork off any number of light weight copy-on-write clones?

In my home folder I have a number of sub folders that contain nearly identical data. I'd like to both reduce the wasted space, and speed up the time it takes to create a new copy of the data folder.

I do not have admin right to the machine.

Answer 1

If you can arrange with the administrator to be delegated ZFS access to your own ZFS filesystem, then this can be done in a controlled way, using ZFS without you needing to be an administrator. Other than ZFS, I don't have any specific ideas. My only idea would be to investigate if FUSE is availabile on Solaris, and see if there are any user-runnable filesystems that do what you want through the FUSE interface.