Hey all, My current backup system consists of a rsync/tarball combination, where rsync syncs the X directories to a remote server via SSH. When rsync is done, a tarball containing all the files and directories is created on the backup server.
The result is a backup server where there's a ~/latest/ directory containing a clone of the backed up directories/files, and a ~/tarballs/ directory containing 14 tarballs, one for each day going 14 days back. This has worked well for many years. I can get to the data at any given day, as long as I don't need to go more than 14 days back. What's bad about this solution is the massive amounts of wasted space, because the same files exists in a lot of tarballs. So I thought: How about using ZFS snapshots instead of tarballs? On the surface it looked like the perfect match: Run rsync, and when done, take a ZFS snapshot. But when I started messing around with it, I quickly discovered that recovering lost files where a bit more tricky than with my current system. If I need to recover a file from 10 days back, I just grab the 10 day old tarball and restore the file from that. All the remaining tarballs remain as is. If I do the same with a ZFS snapshot, I'd have to destroy all the snapshots done between the latest and the 10 day old one, meaning all changes made since that day is lost. This is obviously not so good. Is there a way to revert to an earlier snapshot, without having to destroy all the snapshots between now and then? Or will I have to first copy the ~/latest/ directory to another fs, restore from the snapshot, grab the file and then copy ~/latest/ back again and take a new snapshot? Man, is this even making any kind of sense? LOL Is anybody using ZFS snapshots as part of a backup solution, and if so, how do you handle restoring lost files, without losing a lot of valuable data? :o) /Thomas -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
