On 2013-Mar-01 08:24:53 -0600, Karl Denninger <k...@denninger.net> wrote: >If I then restore the base and snapshot, I get back to where I was when >the latest snapshot was taken. I don't need to keep the incremental >snapshot for longer than it takes to zfs send it, so I can do: > >zfs snapshot pool/some-filesystem@unique-label >zfs send -i pool/some-filesystem@base pool/some-filesystem@unique-label >zfs destroy pool/some-filesystem@unique-label > >and that seems to work (and restore) just fine.
This gives you an incremental since the base snapshot - which will probably grow in size over time. If you are storing the ZFS send streams on (eg) tape, rather than receiving them, you probably still want the "Towers of Hanoi" style backup hierarchy to control your backup volume. It's also worth noting that whilst the stream will contain the compression attributes of the filesystem(s) in it, the actual data is the stream in uncompressed >This in turn means that keeping more than two incremental dumps offline >has little or no value; the second merely being taken to insure that >there is always at least one that has been written to completion without >error to apply on top of the base. This is quite a critical point with this style of backup: The ZFS send stream is not intended as an archive format. It includes error detection but no error correction and any error in a stream renders the whole stream unusable (you can't retrieve only part of a stream). If you go this way, you probably want to wrap the stream in a FEC container (eg based on ports/comms/libfec) and/or keep multiple copies. The "recommended" approach is to do zfs send | zfs recv and store a replica of your pool (with whatever level of RAID that meets your needs). This way, you immediately detect an error in the send stream and can repeat the send. You then use scrub to verify (and recover) the replica. >(Yes, I know, I've been a ZFS resister.... ;-)) "Resistance is futile." :-) On 2013-Mar-01 15:34:39 -0500, Daniel Eischen <deisc...@freebsd.org> wrote: >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. Snapshots appear in a .zfs/snapshot/SNAPSHOT_NAME directory at each mountpoint and are accessible as a normal read-only directory hierarchy below there. OTOH, the send stream _is_ a blob. >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. The output from zfs send is a stream of bytes that you can treat as you would any other stream of bytes. But this approach isn't recommended. -- Peter Jeremy
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