On 8 mars 2010, at 11:33, Svein Skogen wrote: > Let's say for a moment I should go for this solution, with the rpool tucked > away on an usb-stick in the same case as the LTO-3 tapes it "matches" > timelinewise (I'm using HP C8017A kits) as a zfs send -R to a file on the > USB stick. (If, and that's a big if, I get amanda or bacula to do a job I'm > comfortable with that has been verified. Not a stab at those software > projects, more a stab at them being an unknown entity for me), how would I go > about restoring: > > a) the boot record > b) the rpool (and making it actually bootable off the usb stick) > c) the storage zpool (probably after I get the system back up after a and b, > but please humor me).
Assuming that you use a USB key/external drive for booting, all you need to do is dd it to an identically sized one while the key is not the current boot volume (dd if=/dev/disk1 of=/dev/disk2 while on your computer), and there you have your boot record and your rpool. Stick in the backup key, tell your BIOS to boot from a USB device and you're running. This requires downtime while you're creating the copy. If the disks that make up your storage zpool are still available, it will probably automount without any difficulty, or worst case, you'll need to do a zpool import -f <poolname>. Note that this also brings over all of your zfs based sharing configuration (sharenfs & sharesmb) so your clients are back online with a minimum of fuss. No zfs send/recv required in this scenario. Note that there are no dependencies between the boot pool and the storage pool. No timeline matching to worry about. Think of data backup and boot volume backup as two entirely distinct operations to manage. In a worst case, ie, you lost the whole machine, you have a boot key and you've bought new disks. The boot process is still the same with no tapes or files involved. In this case you'll need to create a new zpool from your new disks and restore the data. The restore process depends on your backup process. If you're using amanda or bacula, you create new zfs filesystems and restore to them as per the tool in question. If you've ignored the current advice and are using zfs send streams to tape, you'll start with your baseline tape file and pipe the file to zfs recv and the name of the destination filesystem you want to create. And pray that there are no errors reading from the tape. If you're using zfs send/recv to some other kind of external storage like USB drives, you just plug them in, zpool import and be back in business right away with the option to do a send/recv to clone the filesystems to the new disks. Or you can go the traditional route (no downtime for the backup process of the boot volume), the instructions at: <http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Troubleshooting_Guide#ZFS_Root_Pool_Recovery> are quite detailed as to the process involved for both backing up to file and restoring. Erik _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
