My old desktop (with SCSI disks) died, and I'd been limping along on a loaner until the new one (with SATA disks) arrived a few days ago. The steps needed to migrate the data from one to the other turned out to be remarkably simple, so I thought I would share them in case anyone else ever runs into this. The old box had a single pool:

NAME                    SIZE    USED   AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH     ALTROOT
space                    68G   16.6G   51.4G    24%  ONLINE     -

with two file-systems therein:

NAME                   USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
space                 16.6G  50.3G    99K  /export/home
space/jbeck           12.2G  50.3G  12.2G  /export/home/jbeck
space/local           4.25G  50.3G  4.25G  /usr/local

First, on the new box, I ran:

% zpool create space mirror c2d0 c3d0

Then:

• I temporarily tweaked /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /.ssh/authorized_keys to allow root from the old box to ssh to the new without being prompted for a password (not sure if this step was needed or not)
• Since my desktop is also my mail server, I disabled sendmail to make sure that no mail would come in during the migration
• On the old box I ran:

% zfs snapshot -r space@today
% zfs send space/jbeck@today | ssh newbox zfs recv -d space
% zfs send space/local@today | ssh newbox zfs recv -d space

The two send/recv runs took roughly 30 and 10 minutes respectively, much less than the almost two hours that the back-to-back tar method used to take to do this. Finally, on the new box, I ran:

% zfs set mountpoint=/export/home space
% zfs set mountpoint=/usr/local space/local
% zfs set sharenfs=on space/jbeck space/local

And that was it! I'm a happy ZFS user, but note that Matt told me that he is working on an RFE to make the above even simpler:

I'm working on some enhancements to zfs send/recv that will simplify this even further, especially in cases where you have many filesystems, snapshots, or changed properties. In particular, you'll be able to simply do:

# zfs snapshot -r space@today
# zfs send -r -b space@today | ssh newbox zfs recv -p -d newpool

The "send -b" flag means to send from the beginning. This will send a full stream of the oldest snapshot, and incrementals up to the named snapshot (eg, from @a to @b, from @b to @c, ... @j to @today). This way your new pool will have all of the snapshots from your old pool.

The "send -r" flag means to do this for all the filesystem's descendants as well (in this case, space/jbeck and space/local).

The "recv -p" flag means to preserve locally set properties (in this case, the mountpoint and sharenfs settings).

For more information, see RFEs 6421959 and 6421958, and watch for a forthcoming formal interface proposal.

Nice work, ZFS team.