Thinking about it, I think Darren is right. An automatic send/receive to the
external drive may be preferable, and it sounds like it has many advantages:
1. It's directional, your backups will always go from your live drive to the
backup, never the other way unless you actually force it with -f.
2. It protects any changes on your backup drive.
3. It doesn't affect the performance of your original drive.
4. You can run the actual send/receive at a lower priority (could it be
throttled too?), reducing the impact on the system.
5. Differently sized disks work fine, and in fact a larger external disk
potentially allows you to store more snapshots on there than on your live
system.
6. Tim Foster already has something like this working:
http://blogs.sun.com/timf/entry/zfs_automatic_backup_0_1
The only things missing that I can think of are ETA calculations for send /
receive, and the fact that I'm not sure how you would boot or restore from it.
A manual restore process wouldn't be too much of a hassle though, and if we're
honest, an ETA or even a progress indicator for zfs send/receive would be a
godsend for Solaris anyway.
After all, don't you just love it when you're backing up a 2TB storage array
and your boss says "how long is that going to take", and your only answer is
"haven't a clue boss. Theoretically around 8 hours".
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