Svein Skogen wrote:
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On 04.03.2010 13:18, Erik Trimble wrote:
Svein Skogen wrote:
And again ...
Is there any work on an upgrade of zfs send/receive to handle resuming
on next media?
I was thinking something along the lines of zfs send (when device goes
full) returning
"send suspended. To resume insert new media and issue zfs resume
<IDNUMBER>"
and receive handling:
"zfs receive stream ended before end of file system. Insert next media
and issue zfs resume <IDNUMBER>"
Both of these would give us the ability to do graceful backups (at
near wirespeed of modern SAS autoloaders) and restores with few
additional tools.
With a little tweak, I suspect zstreamdump could handle verifies as
well...
//Svein
What you are after is 'zfs send|receive' to act just like
ufsdump|ufsrestore. Frankly, I don't think that's going to happen
anytime soon. dump|receive are badly out-of-date (not just on Solaris,
but on any OS). They suck as any sort of larger scale backup system, as
they are missing any sort of indexing and browsing tools, no tape
identification and cataloging, and are really only useful for fast
restore of very limited, well-defined data sets (at this point, OS
reinstalls, really).
I can certainly see having 'zfs send|receive' being able to split their
stream into chunks somehow - this would make integration with things
like Amanda much simpler. But let's face it: it's /highly/ unlikely
that you would have just 'zfs send|receive' without also being able to
get at your add-on backup software, all of which is simple to install
(and, even if you are using many commercial packages, they're even able
to be run for a short time without license keys).
The scenario of "my server burned to the ground, and all I've got is the
OS CD and a single backup tape" is pretty much dust with the ancients
nowdays - if you find yourself in such a scenario, you've either done
some really poor planning, or civilization has collapsed.
Actually, this sounds a lot like "if you're not a big enough corporation
to have multiple locations with servers on line, your data just isn't
important enough to store backups of in the first place".
No, the point I'm making is that dump/restore are OBSOLETE. It's been
replaced by things like Bacula and Amanda (on the freeware side), and
Networker or NetBackup on the commercial side. dump/restore are
hideously out of date, and are severely lacking in features for anyone
these days. Performance on them is horrible, too. The situation is
analogous to cpio - yes, there are very limited places where its useful,
but it really has been completely supplanted by tar (esp. gtar). Go
look at the new tools, and quit complaining that we haven't completely
emulated your Old Favorite tool. Frankly, using dump/restore as your
backup tools means you are making life /much/ more difficult for
yourself than necessary.
I'm a one-man photographer. I have the server solution at home. This
home is built from wood, but I have a real solid cellar with a safe
suitable for tapes, and I have a safe off-location place to store 20
tapes (which will be used for rotation).
But, I guess my data simply isn't important enough, since I cant afford
to have two locations with online servers to do real-time sync.
Thanks for making this so clear to me, since this means I'll have to
look at alternatives to Opensolaris sooner, rather than later.
(And as you can read, the situation where all I have left is a stack of
tapes, and a new server from insurance to restore ISN'T dependant on
civilization collapsing, but something that I must prepare for that
_CAN_ happen. But thanks for making it obvious that OpenSolaris+ZFS for
me is a solution in hunt of a problem, rather than the solution for my
setup)
//Svein
Once again, you are missing the point. What I'm saying is that unless
you have completely lost all network connectivity to the outside world
(in which case, you have much bigger problems than your server being
dead) AND you didn't plan to have a small USB flash drive or DVD sitting
around, the old concept of 'restore from just OS media and single
backup tape' isn't realistic.
To be clear, you can do what you want with the following items (besides
your server):
(1) OpenSolaris LiveCD
(1) 8GB USB Flash drive
As many tapes as you need to store your data pools on.
Make sure the USB drive has a saved stream from your rpool. It should
also have a downloaded copy of whichever main backup software you use.
That's it. You backup data using Amanda/Bacula/et al onto tape. You
backup your boot/root filesystem using 'zfs send' onto the USB key.
You've been given several simple ways to restore from bare metal a ZFS
filesystem. None require expensive extra hardware, or are any more
labor-intensive (or sysadm-unfriendly) than doing so on FreeBSD.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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