> I'm just curious at what others are currently doing to back up huge > amounts of data. eg. 2TB and onwards.
I'm using rdiff-backup and some scripting to backup ZFS snapshots. Other than the use of the ZFS snapshots there's nothing special about it. If your use case is suitable for rdiff-backup, using it with ZFS is a nice combination. For 2 TB+ I do suspect you would want to divide that up into multiple distinct rdiff-backup sets and indeed dependening on situation you may still have a problem with performance. In general I don't know that there is a lot ZFS specific to know about backups other than the availability of snapshots, and other than the potential to use zfs send/receive. Personally I am reluctant to use ZFS send/receive at this stage, because it is too dependent on ZFS. I would love to use it for maintaining a hot standby machine, or having an almost-realtime backup in the best case senario. But I would probably want a generic non-ZFS specific backup as my primary backup as well. One risk that you want to target with ZFS is that of a bug in ZFS itself; such bugs could conceivably be such that it affects your zfs send/receive backup. You mention: > 3. ZFS -> Remote ZFS using RSync (Living in Australia, there are > limits on data transfer of a few hundred GB per month, to costs are > prohibitive) rdiff-backup will be good in this senario too, giving you a rolling window of history in addition to an up-to-date mirror. It does do incremental updates including applying the rsync algorithm on individual files. It is definitely slower, in terms of CPU usage, than rsync however so if you have massive amounts of small files you may feel there is an issue. That said, I'm using it regularly to backup millions of files (e.g. collections of Maildir mailboxes). I mention rdiff-backup but of course there are plenty of others. I just happen to prefer rdiff-backup, mostly because of it's "rsync mirror + history" semantics and completely trivial setup. -- / Peter Schuller PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <peter.schul...@infidyne.com>' Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to getpgp...@scode.org E-Mail: peter.schul...@infidyne.com Web: http://www.scode.org
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