Joerg Schilling wrote:
Justin Stringfellow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Why aren't you using amanda or something else that uses
tar as the means by which you do a backup?
Using something like tar to take a backup forgoes the ability
>> to do things like the clever incremental backups that ZFS can
>> achieve though; e.g. only backing the few blocks that have
>> changed in a very large file rather than the whole file
>> regardless. If 'zfs send' doesn't do something we need
>> to fix it rather than avoid it, IMO.
Have a look at star....
Star supports true incremental backups.
I think ZFS send/receive does this too: you can generate incremental
backup streams between snapshots.
I guess all that's missing is the tape control.
From a UNIX philosophy point of view, it'd be good if there was a tape
writing program that handled the tape-swapping-when-out-of-space part
(does tar do that ?) with ZFS being able to concentrate on what it's
best at: being the best combined volume manager+filesystem on the planet.
As Eric alluded to, we have the primitives at the moment - it sounds
like it'd be a shame to have to build an all-singing, all-dancing backup
solution from scratch, when most of the building blocks are there
already. Surely it would be possible to take these blocks and create
something from them ? (Police Squad/Naked Gun puns welcome)
As mentioned before, I've finished a simple implementation of the
scheduled snapshot requirement[1], deleting snapshots as required
according to some user-defined rules (Google for 'zfs automatic
snapshots' + "I'm Feeling Lucky" and you'll find it) Other than the RFEs
that Eric mentioned, how much more on top of this would be required for
a /real/ backup solution ?
cheers,
tim
[1] more review welcome - I'm sure I've missed something important - is
there any reason why we can't use this ?
ps. Dale mentioned the idea of a zpool configuration dump during backup
- would this be just replaying a log of zpool history events from a
given date, or recording the output of "zpool status -v" just prior to
doing the backup ?
Personally, for saved backups, during the restoration step, I'd be more
concerned about the filesystem contents, not the exact configuration of
the pool they once sat in (especially if I'm only doing the restore
because I've found (the hard way) that I need a more reliable disk
replication setup...)
--
Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Operating Platforms Group
Engineering Operations http://blogs.sun.com/timf
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