On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 21:00 +0000, Gavin Maltby wrote: > On 02/21/08 16:31, Rich Teer wrote: > > > What is the current preferred method for backing up ZFS data pools, > > preferably using free ($0.00) software, and assuming that access to > > individual files (a la ufsbackup/ufsrestore) is required? > > For home use I am making very successful use of zfs incremental send > and receive. A script decides which filesystems to backup (based > on a user property retrieved by zfs get) and snapshots the filesystem; > it then looks for the last snapshot that the pool I'm backing > up and the pool I'm backing up to have in common, and > does a zfs send -i | zfs reveive over than.
We're using a perl script which uses zfs incremental send/recv, which works pretty well for our purposes. However I hear [1] that these commands will only run on an idle thread, so get enough cores in the boxes at both ends to handle any processing demands whilst they are running. > Backups are pretty > quick since there is not huge amount of churn in the filesystems, > and on my backup disks I have browsable access to snapshot of > my data from every backup I have run. > I also leave the snapshots visible (zfs set snapdir=visible) on the fileservers so that users can retrieve old versions of their files if they need to. HTH, Chris [1] http://www.joyeur.com/2008/01/22/bingodisk-and-strongspace-what-happened _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
