Darren J Moffat <darren.mof...@oracle.com> wrote:
> That assumes you are writing the 'zfs send' stream to a file or file
> like media. In many cases people using 'zfs send' for they backup
> strategy are they are writing it back out using 'zfs recv' into another
> pool. In those cases the files can even be restored over NFS/CIFS by
> using the .zfs/snapshot directory
If you unpack the datastream from zfs send on a machine on a different location
that is safe against e.g. a fire that destroys the main machine, you may call
it a backup.
> > Star implements incremental backups and restores based on POSIX compliant
> > archives.
>
> ZFS filesystem have functionality beyond POSIX and some of that is
> really very important for some people (especially those using CIFS)
As I mentioned many times in the past, star in contrary to other archives I
know has the right infrastructure that allows to add support for additional
metadata easily. The main problem seems to be that some people from inside Sun
signal that they are not interested in star and that this discourages customers
that do not maintain their own sw infrastructure. Adding missing features on
the other side only makes sens if there is interes in using these features.
> Does Star (or any other POSIX archiver) backup:
> ZFS ACLs ?
Now that libsec finally supports the needed features, it only needs to be
defined and implemented. I am waiting since a few years on a discussion to
define the textual format to be used in the tar headers...
> ZFS system attributes (as used by the CIFS server and locally) ?
star does support such things for Linux and FreeBSD, the problem on Solaris is
that the documentation of the interfaces for this Solaris local feature is poor.
The was Sun tar archives the attibutes is non-portable.
Could you point to documentation?
> ZFS dataset properties (compression, checksum etc) ?
Where is the documentation of the interfaces?
> If it doesn't then it is providing an "archive" of the data in the
> filesystem, not a full/incremental copy of the ZFS dataset. Which
> depending on the requirements of the backup may not be enough. In
> otherwords you have data/metadata missing from your backup.
>
> The only tool I'm aware of today that provides a copy of the data, and
> all of the ZPL metadata and all the ZFS dataset properties is 'zfs send'.
I encourage you to collaborate... Provide information for documentation in the
interfaces and help to discuss the archive format extensions for the missing
features.
Jörg
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