On Jun 28, 2010, at 12:26 PM, Tristram Scott wrote: >> I use Bacula which works very well (much better than >> Amanda did). >> You may be able to customize it to do direct zfs >> send/receive, however I find that although they are >> great for copying file systems to other machines, >> they are inadequate for backups unless you always >> intend to restore the whole file system. Most people >> want to restore a file or directory tree of files, >> not a whole file system. In the past 25 years of >> backups and restores, I've never had to restore a >> whole file system. I get requests for a few files, >> or somebody's mailbox or somebody's http document >> root. >> You can directly install it from CSW (or blastwave). > > Thanks for your comments, Brian. I should look at Bacula in more detail. > > As for full restore versus ad hoc requests for files I just deleted, my > experience is mostly similar to yours, although I have had need for full > system restore more than once. > > For the restore of a few files here and there, I believe this is now well > handled with zfs snapshots. I have always found these requests to be down to > human actions. The need for full system restore has (almost) always been > hardware failure. > > If the file was there an hour ago, or yesterday, or last week, or last month, > then we have it in a snapshot. > > If the disk died horribly during a power outage (grrr!) then it would be very > nice to be able to restore not only the full file system, but also the > snapshots too. The only way I know of achieving that is by using zfs send > etc. >
I like snapshots when I'm making a major change to the system or for cloning. So to me, snapshots are good for transaction based operations. Such as stopping & flushing a database, take a snapshot, then resume the database. Then you can back up the snapshot with Bacula and destroy the snapshot when the backup is complete. I have Bacula configured with a pre-backup and post-backup scripts to do just that. When you do the restore, it will create something that "looks" like a snapshot from the file system perspective, but isn't really one. But if you're looking for a copy of a file from a specific date, Bacula retains that. In fact you specify the retention period you want and you'll have access to any/all individual files on a per date basis. You can retain the files for months or years if you like, and you specify that in the Bacula config file as to how long you want to keep the tapes around. So it really comes down to your use-case. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
