Yes Ive thought about some off-site strategy. My parents are used to loading their data onto an external hard drive, however this always struck me as a bad strategy. A tape backup system is unlikely due to the cost, however I could get them to continue also loading the data onto an external hard drive. In the ideal case the following would happen: They drag their windows files onto the ZFS server to store them. This then triggers an automatic load of the files onto an external hard drive. To implement this I guess I could have the external hard drive always plugged into the ZFS system and write a scrip to load the files onto the external also. Im not sure if its possible to do this on the windows side, i.e writing some script to load the data onto the external when its plugged into the windows machine.
That said I have read about software that will automatically backup data. Presumably I could configure the software to load the data onto the server, and at the same time load it onto the external which would be attached to their windows machine, and have it do this every night. I haven't looked too hard into this yet as I'm presuming there will be complications in having a windows backup program deal with loading data onto an OpenSolaris server. Though it might be straightforward, I just haven't looked at it yet. The ZFS send/receive command can presumably only send the filesystem to another OpenSolaris OS right? Is there anyone way to send it to a normal Linux distribution (ext3)? I have one more question about the hardware setup. You said to get a breakout cable for the SAS plugs. Is it advisable to put 4 hard drives onto one SAS plug? I was thinking of just getting 4 SATA to SAS cables and hooking each drive up to a different SAS plug (as I believe there are 8.) I am also going to look into setting up some system for accessing the server over the internet. FTP would be the easiest choice, however it might be fun to set up an Apache server. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
