On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 05:25:11PM -0700, Peter Looyenga wrote:
> I looked into backing up ZFS and quite honostly I can't say I am convinced
> about its usefullness here when compared to the traditional ufsdump/restore.
> While snapshots are nice they can never substitute offline backups. And
> although you can keep quite some snapshots lying about it will consume
> diskspace, one of the reasons why people also keep offline backups.
>
> However, while you can make one using 'zfs send' it somewhat worries me that
> the only way to perform a restore is by restoring the entire filesystem
> (/snapshot). I somewhat shudder at the thought of having to restore
> /export/home this way to retrieve but a single file/directory.
To achive that you can combine ZFS snapshots + ZFS send/receive.
[ UFS ]
- to restore one/two/... files
use ufsrestore
- to restore entire filesystem
use ufsrestore
[ ZFS ]
- to restore one/two/... files
use snapshot(s)
- to restore entire filesystem
use 'zfs receive'
> Am I overlooking something here or are people indeed resorting to tools like
> tar and the likes again to overcome all this? In my opinion ufsdump /
> ufsrestore was a major advantage over tar and I really would consider it a
> major drawback if that would be the only way to backup data in such a way
> where it can be more easily restored.
Now in zfs-era :-) it seems we have to change way of thinking about
filesystems. Usually system administrators
are restoring two things:
- particular files
- entire filesystems
Both are achievable by above combination. What is more important is that
zfs-way (restore a file) seems to be easier.
:-)
przemol
_______________________________________________
zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
