ZFS + rsync, backup on steroids. I was thinking today about backing up filesystems, and came up with an awesome idea. Use the power of rsync and ZFS together.
Start with a one or two large SATA/PATA drives if you use two and don't need the space you can mirror other wise just use as in raid0, enable compression unless your files are mostly precompressed, use rsync as the backup tool, the first time you just copy the data over. After you are done, take a snapshot, export the pool. And uninstall the drives until next time. When next time rolls around have rsync update the changed files, as it does block copies of changed data, only a small part of the data has changed. After than is done, take a snapshot. Now thanks to ZFS you have complete access to incremental backups, just look at the desired snapshots. For now rsync doesn't support nfsv4 acls, but at least you have the data. The best part of this solution is that its completely free, and uses tools that you most likely are are already familiar with, and has features that are only available in commercial apps. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
