From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Mar 1 20:37:34 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [8.8.178.115]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 832838E4 for ; Fri, 1 Mar 2013 20:37:34 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from karl@denninger.net) Received: from fs.denninger.net (wsip-70-169-168-7.pn.at.cox.net [70.169.168.7]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 52DF616C0 for ; Fri, 1 Mar 2013 20:37:34 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by fs.denninger.net (8.14.6/8.13.1) with ESMTP id r21KbWW9065908 for ; Fri, 1 Mar 2013 14:37:32 -0600 (CST) (envelope-from karl@denninger.net) Received: from [127.0.0.1] [192.168.1.40] by Spamblock-sys (LOCAL); Fri Mar 1 14:37:32 2013 Message-ID: <51311186.1070607@denninger.net> Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:37:26 -0600 From: Karl Denninger User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130215 Thunderbird/17.0.3 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Musings on ZFS Backup strategies References: <20130301165040.GA26251@anubis.morrow.me.uk> <20130301185912.GA27546@anubis.morrow.me.uk> In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 1.5 X-Antivirus: avast! (VPS 130301-0, 03/01/2013), Outbound message X-Antivirus-Status: Clean Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.14 X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2013 20:37:34 -0000 On 3/1/2013 2:34 PM, Daniel Eischen wrote: > On Fri, 1 Mar 2013, Ben Morrow wrote: > >> Quoth Daniel Eischen : >>> >>> Yes, we still use a couple of DLT autoloaders and have nightly >>> incrementals and weekly fulls. This is the problem I have with >>> converting to ZFS. Our typical recovery is when a user says >>> they need a directory or set of files from a week or two ago. >>> Using dump from tape, I can easily extract *just* the necessary >>> files. I don't need a second system to restore to, so that >>> I can then extract the file. >> >> As Karl said originally, you can do that with snapshots without having >> to go to your backups at all. With the right arrangements (symlinks to >> the .zfs/snapshot/* directories, or just setting the snapdir property to >> 'visible') you can make it so users can do this sort of restore >> themselves without having to go through you. > > It wasn't clear that snapshots were traversable as a normal > directory structure. I was thinking it was just a blob > that you had to roll back to in order to get anything out > of it. > > Under our current scheme, we would remove snapshots > after the next (weekly) full zfs send (nee dump), so > it wouldn't help unless we kept snapshots around a > lot longer. > > Am I correct in assuming that one could: > > # zfs send -R snapshot | dd obs=10240 of=/dev/rst0 > > to archive it to tape instead of another [system:]drive? > Yes. -- -- Karl Denninger /The Market Ticker ®/ Cuda Systems LLC