Dale Ghent wrote:
See, you're talking with a person who saves prtvtoc output of all his disks so that if a disk dies, all I need to do to recreate the dead disk's exact slice layout on the replacement drive is to run that saved output through fmthard. One second on the command line rather than spending 10 minutes hmm'ing and haw'ing around in format. ZFS seems like it would be a prime candidate for this sort of thing.
Ok, so I only managed data centers for 10 years. I can count on 2 fingers the times this was useful to me. It is becoming less useful over time unless your recovery disk is exactly identical to the lost disk. This may sound easy, but it isn't. In the old days, Sun put specific disk geometry information for all FRU-compatible disks, no matter who the supplier was. Since we use multiple suppliers, that enabled us to support some products which were very sensitive to the disk geometry. Needless to say, this is difficult to manage over time (and expensive). A better approach is to eliminate the need to worry about the geometry. ZFS is an example of this trend. You can now forget about those things which were painful, such as the borkeness created when you fmthard to a different disk :-) Methinks you are working too hard :-) I do agree that (evil) quotas and other attributes are useful to carry with the backup, but that is no panacea either and we'll need to be able to overrule them. For example, suppose I'm consolidating two servers onto one using backups. If I apply a new quota to an existing file system, then I may go over quota -- resulting in even more manual labor. -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
