> > However, I don't think that's what they're talking > about here. I think they're talking about a ZFS pool > that consists of an external USB device, and doing a > send / receive directly to that pool. That way the > USB device is a true backup copy of your ZFS pool, > and I think the idea is that you can then delete > snapshots from your main system, confident that they > are still present on the USB backup.
That's exactly it. While it's great to have snapshots stored on the same device as the filesystem for convenience, this is limited in that it's not a full recovery solution since it doesn't offer any protection from physical hardware failure, especially on laptops and workstations where there will most likely be just one hard disk on the system. What we have right now is protection from user and software errors which is probably the source of most cases of data loss or corruption, but we need to extend this to cover hardware failure, and we need to be able to backup to secondary devices to acheive that. For most single users that means an external USB disk or thumb drive. > > If it works it's a nice idea, especially with an > integrated restore interface. That would also be part of our plan. Cheers, Niall > > And yeah, auto mounting isn't something you're going > to want to enable on production servers. But for > desktop / development / small scale use, it's a great > idea. > > And I agree 100% about hotplug stuff being untrusted > input. You shouldn't be able to crash anything with > a USB stick, especially not a bunch of unrelated ZFS > filesystems. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
