The dot in ... --- ...
Chris Gerhard's Weblog
Friday June 01, 2007
Rolling incremental backups Why do you take back ups?
User error
Hardware failure
Disaster Recovery
Admin Error
With ZFS using redundant storage and plenty of snapshots my data should be safe from the first two. However that still leaves two ways all my data could be lost if I don't take some sort of back up.
Given the constraints I have my solution is to use my external USB disk containing a standalone zpool and then use zfs send and receive via this script to send all the file systems I really care about to the external drive.
To make this easier I have put all the filesystems into another “container” filesystem which has the “nomount” option set so it is hidden from the users. I can then recursively send that file system to the external drive. Also to stop the users getting confused by extra file systems appearing and disappearing I have set the mount point on the external disk to “none”.
The script only uses the snapshots that are prefixed “day” (you can change that with the -p (prefix) option) so that it reduces the amount of work that the script does. Backing up the snapshots that happen every 10 minutes on this system does not seem worth while for a job I will run once a day or so.
The really cool part of this is that once I had the initial snapshot on the external drive every back up from now on will be incremental. A rolling incremental backup. How cool is that.
# time ./zfs_backup tank/fs/safe removable/safe real 12m10.49s user 0m11.87s sys 0m12.32s # zfs list tank/fs/safe removable/safe NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT removable/safe 78.6G 66.0G 18K none tank/fs/safe 81.8G 49.7G 18K /tank/fs #
The performance is slightly disappointing due to the number of transport errors that are reported by the usb2scsa layer but the data is really on the disk so I am happy.
Currently I don't have the script clearing out the old snapshots but will get that going later. The idea of doing this over ssh to a remote site is compelling when I can find a suitable remote site.
( Jun 01 2007, 05:01:20 PM BST ) Permalink Trackback
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Posted by The dot in ... --- ... on June 13, 2007 at 05:02 PM BST #