i have been experimenting with this and think i have a workable solution.
only problem is that nexenta is a bit of a pain to get backuppc running on.
just seems to have a lot of little issues with backuppc 3.1 (running nexenta
a7)
i just downloaded solaris express to see if i have better luck with it and
backuppc.
i can tell you that ZFS and snapshots are very nice! basically, you can
send a snapshot as a stream to any output like this:
zfs send data/[EMAIL PROTECTED] | gzip > zfsarchive.gz
or better yet
zfs send data/[EMAIL PROTECTED] | ssh hostname zfs recv -F
data/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
which is basically doing something kinda like imaging the filesystem and
throwing it accross an ssh tunnel and rebuilding it on the other side. on
my local network i can get over 30MB/s speed doing this between 2 machines
on gigabit and it doesnt count the files so it starts instantly. you can
also push this accross in an incremental fassion so you could:
take snapshot
send snapshot to remote machine
wait 1 minute
take another snapshot
send difference between snapshot 1 and snapshot 2 to remote machine
wait 1 minute
repeat
you need to add in some scripting to rollup the snapshot on the remote
machine because that is what ZFS sends. also, the receiving machine has to
create a new filesystem for the received filesystem so that will need to
have a new name each backup, probably just call the snapshot $date so it is
unique.
additionally, if the remote machine is to be a proper copy, then an
additional setup of changing the mount point of the ZFS filesystem from
data/dir_transfer to /data/dir.
at the end of each cycle you can roll the snapshots up on the remote machine
with an remote exec ssh command and also delete all but the most recent 2
snapshots.
from my understanding of the ZFS snapshot process, it works on the block
level so changing part of a 1GB file will only cause the snapshot to write
the amount of the change and also allow incremental transfers of very large
files very quickly. something like rsync does for files but on the
filesystem level rather than the file level. when i test this out i get a
snapshot in less than a second and when i change the file, the one in the
snapshot is there without writing a GB.
it would be quite interesting to mod backuppc to be ZFS native and use
snapshots instead of hardlinks. snapshots in ZFS are always accessible
like:
/data/dir
/data/dir/.zfs/snapshot-1-name/
/data/dir/.zfs/snapshot-2-name/
etc etc
basically the backup command would first take a snapshot and name it a
backup number, then do the standard file transfer right onto the directory.
On Dec 6, 2007 7:10 PM, Nate Carlson < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote:
> > so the only way I can see replication helping, is if you don't have time
> > to do multiple backups in a given cycle. this is certainly the case in
> > many situations; but if it's not, then it may be adviseable to not
> > bother trying to build a replicant of your backuppc server.
>
> I'm still very curious to see how well this would work with ZFS:
>
> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/
>
> "ZFS backup and restore are powered by snapshots. Any snapshot can
> generate a full backup, and any pair of snapshots can generate an
> incremental backup. Incremental backups are so efficient that they can be
> used for remote replication — e.g. to transmit an incremental update
> every 10 seconds."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> | nate carlson | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.natecarlson.com |
> | depriving some poor village of its idiot since 1981 |
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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