On 2024-02-02, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 2, 2024 at 4:39 PM Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com> > wrote: ><SNIP> >> >> I googled for ZFS backup applications, but didn't find anything that >> seemed to be widespread and "supported" the way that rsnapshot is. > > I'm not exactly sure I'm following your thoughts above but
rsnapshot is an application that uses rsync to do hourly/daily/weekly/monthly (user-configurable) backups of selected directory trees. It's done using rsync to create snapshots. They are in-effect "incremental" backups, because the snapshots themselves are effectively "copy-on-write" via clever use of hard-links by rsync. A year's worth of backups for me is 7 daily + 4 weekly + 12 monthly snapshots for a total of 23 snapshots. If nothing has changed during the year, those 23 snapshots take up the same amount of space as a single snapshot. My understanding of ZFS is that it has built-in snapshot functionality that provides something similar to what is done by rsync by its use of hard-links. In my current setup, there's an application called rsnapshot that manages/controls the snapshots by invoking rsync in various ways. My question was about the existence of a similar application that can be used with ZFS's built-in snapshot support to provide a similar backup scheme. > have you investigated True-NAS? It is Open ZFS based and > does support snapshots. I'm aware of True-NAS, but I'm not looking for NAS. I was asking abouth methods to backup one local disk to another local disk. -- Grant
