Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:35:41 +1100 From: Andrew Reilly <areilly@bigpond.net.au> To: stable@freebsd.org Subject: ZFS backups: retrieving a few files? Message-ID: <20101122113541.GA74719@johnny.reilly.home>
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Hi there, Being a cutting-edge hipster, my new personal server is using a ZFS RAIDZ array, where my older system used UFS on a GMIRROR. This is, by and large, a joy: ZFS rocks. One issue that I'm having difficulty coming to grips with, though, is that of backup. I used to do a weekly cycle (with a two week retention) of incremental backups to an external hard drive. Dump/restore allowed this to be useful both for disaster (hardware failure) recovery and for clumsiness (file destruction) recovery. Dump/restore doesn't work for ZFS. I *think* that I'm running backups in the appropriate equivalent fashion: I take file system snapshots (both absolute == level 0) and relative (incremental), and zfs send those to files on the backup disk. I haven't tried the recovery procedure yet, but it seems that one would zfs receive the same files to snapshots, and then either grab the files scrunged or perform the snapshot->working file system upgrade process described in the manual, depending on the situation. The troubling aspect of this plan is that it would seem that grabbing just a few files would require space in the working zpool equivalent to the whole backed-up file system, for the zfs receive of the snapshot. Contrast this with restore, which had a nice interactive (or command line) mode of operation that could retrieve nominated files or directories, requiring only space for the results. Is there any similar tool that can operate on a ZFS "send" serialization? It would seem that the information must be "in" there somewhere, but I've not heard of it. Clues? How does everyone else manage this? Cheers, -- Andrew
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