On 05/13/2013 05:59 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote:
>What I think/could/ work, though, is if checksumming filesystems like ZFS
>could expose the checksum data to user applications (like backup clients),
The reason that's not possible is because the ZFS checksums don't relate to the
files. They relate to data blocks, which may be file fragments, or contain
multiple files, and always include various forms of filesystem metadata. So
you'll always have to utilize your ZFS checksums via zfs internal commands.
You can scrub your whole pool... There might be a fringe use case where it's
useful to just validate the blocks that are related to certain files, without
doing the whole pool... But I can't think of such a use case.
TSM (and possibly other backup clients) actually does have a block-level
backup agent. Now I've never used it, so I can't speak much about it,
but it seems it could use that per-block checksum data as input if it
were available.
Skylar
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