As I have been grappling with how I will manage ZFS backups using
existing enterprise backup tools (e.g. Netbackup), it seems as though
two approaches continue to dominate:
1) Just use the POSIX interface like is used for UFS,
VxFS, etc. This has key the disadvantage that it
is not efficient (space, time, performance, etc.)
during backup and restore could be impossible
due to the space inefficiency. Other disadvantages
exist as well.
2) Use "zfs send" (but not receive) to do disk-to-disk
backups, then back up the "zfs send" images to tape.
This is also inefficient due to extra space, time,
etc. but you ACL's, snapshots, clones, etc. seem
as though they will be preserved on restore. The
interface to the backup software will require some
scripting, much like anything else that requires
a quiesce before backup.
For a while I was thinking that "zfs send" data streams would be nice
to work with NDMP. However, this solution will only play well with
the commercial products that have been going after the storage
appliance market for quite some time. I'm not aware of free tools
that speak NDMP.
Perhaps a better approach is to create a pseudo file system that looks like:
<mntpt>/pool
/@@
/@today
/@yesterday
/fs
/@@
/@2007-06-01
/otherfs
/@@
As you might imagine, reading from pool/@today would be equivalent to
"zfs send [EMAIL PROTECTED]". Some sort of notation (pool/@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
?) would be needed to represent "zfs send -i [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[EMAIL PROTECTED]". Reading from pool/fs/@@ would be equivalent to "zfs
snapshot pool/fs@<timestamp>; zfs send pool/fs@<timestamp>".
Writing to a particular path would have the same effect as zfs receive.
Is this something that is maybe worth spending a few more cycles on,
or is it likely broken from the beginning?
Mike
--
Mike Gerdts
http://mgerdts.blogspot.com/
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