On 30/08/2006, at 5:17 AM, James Dickens wrote:
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.
I've been doing this for a while (although I don't remove the disks,
just keep them on the other side of the network).
I got the idea from the tool I was using before (http://
www.rsnapshot.org/) which uses hard links to reduce the space usage
at the destination.
You might like to consider the --inplace option to rsync which should
reduce the space usage for files which change in place, since rsync
will just do the changed blocks, rather than making a copy then
applying the changes. The latter will result in all unchanged blocks
in the file being duplicated (in snapshots) on ZFS.
Boyd
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