Tim Foster wrote: > hey there, > > On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 01:07 +0000, Calum Benson wrote: >> On 17 Dec 2008, at 19:27, Tom Georgoulias wrote: >> >>> Is it safe to assume my options are to either wait for the next >>> release of time-slider or roll my own? Are there any other options? >> Well, I guess you could still try using Tim Foster's original ZFS >> Automatic Backup service: >> <http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_automatic_for_the_people
> That said, the backup-save-cmd stuff should work ok in the current > shipping version of the automatic snapshot service in 2008.11, it's just > not feature-complete yet. That is, you should be able to send full or > incremental send streams of each snapshot with the right backup-save-cmd > string - some other folks on zfs-discuss@ were doing that successfully > recently. > A more complete solution for dealing with periodic incremental send > streams is a little more complex (and I haven't got cycles to implement > it at the moment unfortunately) > > It would involve querying the remote server for a list of snapshots > per dataset we're interested in, then determining which snapshots are > common between the local and remote ends. We could then send an > incremental send stream with differences between that common snapshot, > and the one we've just taken locally. > > Right now, as backup-save-cmd is completely freeform, there's no set > protocol to determine how to retrieve that list of remote snapshots, how > to cope with differing levels of snapshots per local dataset[1] etc. so > we just ignore the problem(!). The ZFS Automatic Backup Service did > this properly, checking the USB disk to see whether a full backup stream > was present for each dataset, before choosing to send incrementals, > sending a full backup stream otherwise. > Does that help at all? Absolutely. I've been hacking on a zfs replication shell script that I found on a blog and trying to make it work for my setup. What you've said has just reassured me that the headaches I was running into aren't just a result of my minimal zfs knowledge, as I was struggling with a way to "rotate" the snapshots on the source server (making a new one, getting rid of the oldest, and renaming those in the middle to reflect their new status) and keeping the remote server sync'd up with the source. So far I haven't been successful at that. I know that the fishworks-based Sun Storage 7000 products have the ability to replicate snapshots to remote appliances and keep the systems in semi-sync, so there must be a way to do it. Is that ability available in the open storage pieces of opensolaris? Could we build upon that instead of doing something new? I try pulling out time-slider and go back to trying to use zfs-auto-snapshots. Can't hurt to give that a shot again. Thanks, Tom _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list indiana-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
