On Jan 19, 2010, at 1:53 AM, Julian Regel wrote: > > When we brought it up last time, I think we found no one knows of a > > userland tool similar to 'ufsdump' that's capable of serializing a ZFS > > along with holes, large files, ``attribute'' forks, windows ACL's, and > > checksums of its own, and then restoring the stream in a > > filesystem-agnostic read/write/lseek/... manner like 'ufsrestore'. > > This has been something I've been working on for the last few days and I've > not yet found an adequate solution. I've looked at tar, cpio and pax as > potential tools for backing up a ZFS filesystem to tape, but each has > limitations. As of today, Sun do not provide the ability to reliably backup a > Solaris installation without resorting to third party tools. This is crazy! > > The beauty of ufsdump/ufsrestore is that because it's bundled with the > operating system, I can perform bare metal recovery using a Solaris DVD and > locally attached tape drive. It's simple and arguably essential for system > administrators.
Yep. And it was invented because there was no option other than tar at the time. Today, there are many very comprehensive backup solutions on the market including open source. Some are nicely integrated, such as NexentaStor and Zmanda. > From my perspective, Sun really need to create a zfsdump/zfsrestore set of > commands that perform block level backups of a specified filesystem (or > snapshot) and that preserves ACLs, atime, sparse files, handles multiple > tapes (many of us still use and rely on tape!) etc. In my crystal ball, I see a divergence away from traditional backup solution approaches. Today you can feel comfortable with backing up ZFS file systems because they provide a POSIX file system interface. Other datasets don't resemble POSIX file systems at all, and I see several different types of datasets with the opportunity to become popular with the basic ZVol getting a lot of attention lately. The win will go to the vendor who can provide the best value for the various datasets in the ZFS environment. > Does anyone know the process to formally request this (we have a support > contract), or would I be wasting my time? You can pile onto CR 5004379, want comprehensive backup strategy http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5004379 I can't answer the latter, but judging by the date of the CR, I wouldn't hold my breath. Give the fine folks at Zmanda a look. Also, the ADM project seems to be dead. Unfortunate? http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+adm/WhatisADM -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
