Note to readers: There are multiple topics discussed herein. Please identify which idea(s) you are responding to, should you respond. Also make sure to take in all of this before responding. Something you want to discuss may already be covered at a later point in this e-mail, including NDMP and ZFS ACLs. It's loooong.
It seems to me that something is being overlooked (either by myself or others) in all of these discussions about backing up ZFS pools... The one thing that I keep thinking, and which I have yet to see discredited, is that ZFS file systems use POSIX semantics. So, unless you are using specific features (notably ACLs, as Paul Henson is), you should be able to backup those file systems using well known tools. The ZFS Best Practices Guide speaks to this in section 4.4 (specifically 4.4.3[1]) and there have been various posters who have spoken of using other tools. (Star comes to mind, most prominently.) The Best Practices Guide is also very clear about send and receive NOT being designed explicitly for backup purposes. I find it odd that so many people seem to want to force this point. ZFS appears to have been designed to allow the use of well known tools that are available today to perform backups and restores. I'm not sure how many people are actually using NFS v4 style ACLs, but those people have the most to worry about when it comes to using tar or NetBackup or Networker or Amanda or Bacula or star to backup ZFS file systems. Everyone else, which appears to be the majority of people, have many tools to choose from, tools they've used for a long time in various environments on various platforms. The learning curve doesn't appear to be as steep as most people seem to make it out to be. I honestly think many people may be making this issue more complex than it needs to be. Maybe the people having the most problems are those who are new to Solaris, but if you have any real *nix experience, Solaris shouldn't be that difficult to figure out, especially for those with System V experience. The Linux folks? Well, I sorta feel sorry for you and I sorta don't. So, am I missing something? It wouldn't surprise me if I am. What am I missing? The other things I have been thinking about are NDMP support and what tools out there support NFS v4 ACLs. Has anyone successfully used NDMP support with ZFS? If so, what did you do? How did you configure your system, including any custom coding you did? From the looks of the NDMP project on os.org, NDMP was integrated in build 102[3] but it appears to only be NDMP v4 not the latest, v5. Maybe NDMP support would placate some of those screaming for the send stream to be a tape backup format? As for ACLs[2], the list of tools supporting NFS v4 ACLs seems to be pretty small. I plan to spend some quality time with RFC 3530 to get my head around NFS v4, and ACLs in particular. star seems to be fairly adept, with the exception of the NFS v4 ACL support. Hopefully that is forthcoming? Again, I think those people who are not using ZFS ACLs can probably perform actual tape backups (should they choose to) with existing tools. If I'm mistaken or missing something, I invite someone to please point it out. Finally, there's backup of ZVOLs. I don't know what the commercial tool support for backing up ZVOLs looks like but I know this is the *perfect* place for NDMP. Backing up ZVOLs should be priority #1 for NDMP support in (Open)Solaris, I think. Looking through the symbols in libzfs.so, I don't see anything specifically related to backup of ZVOLs in the existing code. How are people handling ZVOL backups today? Not to be too flip, but star looks like it might be the perfect tape backup software if it supported NDMP, NFS v4 ACLs and ZVOLs. Just thinking out loud... [1] http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Using_ZFS_With_Enterprise_Backup_Solutions [2] http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-5461/ftyxi?l=en&a=view [3] http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Project+ndmp/ Aside: I see so many posts to this list about backup strategy for ZFS file systems, and I continue to be amazed by how few people check the archives for previous discussions before they start a new one. So many of the conversations are repeated over and over, with good information being spread over multiple threads? I personally find it interesting that so few people read first before posting. Few even seem to bother to do so much (little?) as a Google search which would yield several previous discussions on the topic of ZFS pool backups to tape. Oh well. -- "You can choose your friends, you can choose the deals." - Equity Private "If Linux is faster, it's a Solaris bug." - Phil Harman Blog - http://whatderass.blogspot.com/ Twitter - @khyron4eva
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