On Thu, 29 May 2008, Peter Tribble wrote: > > There really aren't tools to back up ZFS. Unlike ufsdump which can do actual > backups of ufs filesystems (although in an untrustworthy manner), there really > isn't anything for ZFS. The built-in tools (snapshots, send/receive) > don't address > the backup question at all.
The author of 'star' says that in his unbiased opinion, 'star' is The Tool to use to back up ZFS. > Even the serious backup utilities (the likes of NetBackup/NetWorker) struggle > to cope properly once ZFS is brought into play. The problem being is that a > combination of low-cost high-capacity drives and zfs allow you to do things > with storage that would until recently have been impossible, and backup > hasn't kept up. > > Backup generally is a huge gaping hole that needs to be filled. I definitely agree. ZFS encourages a proliferation of individual filesystems, each of which has different backup requirements. Some filesystems are critical to back up, while others don't really need to be backed up at all, or can be backed up just once. Some filesystems are huge while others are tiny. To further confuse the situation, ZFS is designed to be foolproof so that it never fails and we mislead ourselves to believe that perhaps the many snapshots and redundancy are a replacement for traditional backups. However, sometimes ZFS fails dramatically and the pool does not come back up. The function of 'zfs send' can be used as the basis for a backup facility, but as it has been pointed out, this approach does not allow individual file retrieval without re-creating an entire filesystem based on what was sent. Bob ====================================== Bob Friesenhahn [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
