From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Nov 11 16:36:47 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E4B291065674 for ; Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:36:47 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from freebsd-fs@m.gmane.org) Received: from lo.gmane.org (lo.gmane.org [80.91.229.12]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A28068FC08 for ; Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:36:47 +0000 (UTC) Received: from list by lo.gmane.org with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1ROu5u-0003u3-B6 for freebsd-fs@freebsd.org; Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:36:46 +0100 Received: from dyn1240-121.vpn.ic.ac.uk ([129.31.240.121]) by main.gmane.org with esmtp (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:36:46 +0100 Received: from jtotz by dyn1240-121.vpn.ic.ac.uk with local (Gmexim 0.1 (Debian)) id 1AlnuQ-0007hv-00 for ; Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:36:46 +0100 X-Injected-Via-Gmane: http://gmane.org/ To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org From: Johannes Totz Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:36:29 +0000 Lines: 32 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org X-Gmane-NNTP-Posting-Host: dyn1240-121.vpn.ic.ac.uk User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 Subject: backing up zfs dataset X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 16:36:48 -0000 Hi, To back up a zfs dataset there are a few possibilities: 1) rsync file data to another machine 2) zfs-send to another machine, into a zfs dataset 3) zfs-send to another machine, dumping the stream to a file The first one works alright but you loose admin info, properties set on the dataset, etc The second is prefered but requires another machine which runs zfs. The third is bad. So far I have been doing (3), for daily short-term backups, works, tested, everything is peachy. However, I dont like it anymore for obvious reasons. Ideally, I would like to go with (2). But I dont have another zfs-capable machine, or the machine that I would like to backup onto will not ever run zfs. So I came up with another crazy idea, assuming the remote machine exports a block device (somehow): 4) zpool-attach the remote block dev as a mirror, let it resilver, offline it during the day, at night online it, resilver, and so on 5) create a pool on the block dev locally on the to-be-backed-up-machine and periodically zfs-send stuff over I would go for (4), it seems to be the mostly automatic. Any thoughts on this? Should I expect things to go titsup if there's network issues? Johannes