Joerg Schilling wrote: > "Richard L. Hamilton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> Zfs has send and receive commands, which more or less correspond to >> ufsdump and ufsrestore for ufs, except that the names send and receive >> are perhaps more appropriate, since the zfs(1m) man page says: >> >>> The format of the stream is evolving. No backwards compatibility is >>> guaranteed. You may not be able to receive your streams on future >>> versions of ZFS." >>> >> which means to me that it's not a really good choice for archiving or >> long-term >> backups, but it should be ok for transferring zfs filesystems between systems >> that are the same OS version (or at any rate, close enough that the format >> of the zfs send/receive datastream is compatible). >> > > Another reason why it does not make a good long term backup is that it does > not > allow to access single files. > > > >> There are of course also generic archiving utilities that can be used for >> backup/restore, like tar (or star), pax, cpio, and so on. But as far as I >> know, >> there's no bare metal backup/restore facility that comes with Solaris, >> although >> there are some commercial (and probably quite expensive) products that >> do that. But there's probably nothing at all that's quite equivalent to >> Norton >> Ghost. >> > > Could you explain what you understand by a "bare metal" backup/restore > facility? > > Jörg > > "bare-metal" restore generally means that you give it a piece of hardware with nothing installed on it, boot it somehow, and the "restore" program can bring the machine all the way back up to a previously-stored state.
Norton Ghost has two main purposes, which are related, but not the same: restoring a fixed configuration to bare metal, and creating clones of a configuration. The first is for bare metal recovery of a crashed (or dead) system back to a previous known state. The second is for using on similar (or identical hardware) to duplicate the same configuration across multiple machines. The UFS utilities 'dump' and 'restore' don't exist for ZFS, and the 'zfs send' or 'zfs receive' are a bit different. HOWEVER, 'zfs send/receive' work fine for a bare metal recovery, as all you are looking for is to restore to a previous fixed state. The process is a bit more involved than with Ghost, and Ghost clearly wins on ease-of-use here. Basically, to do this kind of bare metal restore with Solaris, I would need to have a 'zfs send' file somewhere on the network, then boot the new machine to single user mode (from either a net boot or CD). I'd then have to do some manual work (like configure the network, format and setup the disks) before running a 'zfs receive' command to actually get back my config. For cloning, the combination of the Jumpstart booting/managing tools and the Flash archiver are radically superior to Ghost, both in flexibility and speed. Google 'Solaris JET' to get a good view of the Jumpstart system flexibility and features. Look at 'man flar' for an introduction to flash archives. I agree that zfs send/receive is not a good backup tool, for all the reasons previously discussed. -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca22-123 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
