> > ZFS send to the Dell, and from there backup to tape. > > So out of curiosity, what format are your tapes? I recall reading some > place that the ZFS send format is considered an internal format and may > be subject to change (and hence shouldn't be used as the native format > for archival purposes).
You read that from the man page, under "zfs send." However, they've since changed it - a few months ago. For historical reasons, while they were still figuring out how they wanted to format the "zfs send" datastream, they stuck that comment in there. But the older revs which included any "incompatible" stream formats never made it into any solaris or opensolaris release. So it's relatively safe for you to assume, no matter how old your OS release was, the zfs send datastream has always been, and always will be compatible with newer versions. Despite that comment in the man page, which is now gone. That being said, you still shouldn't use "zfs send" for archival purposes. "zfs send" was meant to be streamed directly into "zfs receive" and not kept on storage in between. There are two major reasons: (a) if a single bit is changed in the "zfs send" datastream, then the whole archive is corrupt. And (b) you can't restore a single file out of the middle of a "zfs send" data stream. You must receive the whole filesystem, or nothing at all. If it's viable for you to backup to removable disks, then "zfs send | zfs receive" is an excellent method of backup. But if you need the backup on tape, it's recommended to use some file-based backup tool that can handle that. To answer your question, we paid for Netbackup, so that's the tool that writes our tapes. I understand Amanda or bacula would be viable alternatives for less than thousands of dollars, but I've not tried them. _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
