On Tue, February 17, 2009 16:56, Joe S wrote: > I have an OpenSolaris snv_105 server at home that holds my photos, > docs, music, etc, in a zfs pool. I backup my laptops with rsync to the > OpenSolaris server. All of my important data is in one place, on the > OpenSolaris server. I want to backup this data. I want to protect > against losing my data, and I would also like to recover previous > versions of files when I make mistakes. > > * I do not have a tape drive, nor do I want to purchase one.
Tape used to be great :-(. These days it's too expensive for home users, I agree. > * I would like to backup to Amazon's S3 service. I have an account. Hmm, that's the big difference from my approach. I haven't looked at S3, but I know that it breaks the basis for my current scheme. The obvious benefit is that you get your backups offsite. The obvious problem is that your outbound bandwidth from home is probably low (mine is under 1Mb). However, $0.15 per GB per month is not tolerable for backup storage for me. For my (roughly) 400GB, that's a cost of $60/month, plus upload and download charges. I can buy a third external drive and rotate one through a desk drawer at work or something for off-site for what the first month would cost including the upload charge, I believe (currently I'm burning optical disks of new photos and storing one copy of those off-site). > I did some searching and it seems that instead of creating a bunch of > tar files (what I do now), I should create regular zfs snapshots and > back those up with Amanda. Does that sound like a viable backup > solution? Then, I was thinking about storing those backups on S3. > > * Has anyone tried this? > * Are there any problems I may run into? > * Are there better ways backup my zfs pool without purchasing > expensive software? My previous, highly satisfactory, scheme: Backup the fileserver via rsync to USB external drives. I had a perl script to do that, and two drives. This was easy because my external drives are bigger than my pool; if you have a big pool this won't work in exactly this form for you. Advantages include: I can mount the backups on the server (or any solaris system, including the livecd) and access the individual files easily. Disadvantages include: I don't believe rsync preserves extended attributes or ACLs. I was previously using Samba, which doesn't use ACLs, so I didn't care, but after a hardware problem I've ended up upgrading Solaris and I'm running CIFS now, and now I do care about ACLs, so I'm changing my backup scheme just a little. My revised scheme is to use zfs send/receive to get incremental backups to the external drives. All the same advantages, and cancels the disadvantage. My experience over the years with backup products has left me very suspicious of creating huge backup files allegedly containing my valuable data; and I extend that to zip and tar, not just the proprietary formats that Acronis or NTI use. It's one more thing to go wrong. If drives don't get big fast enough (and my pool growth has leveled off at this point), I can go to using external eSATA racks or something for backup volumes. Generally speaking, making a snapshot in zfs and then backing that up, by whatever method, is a good way to go; the snapshot is atomic (including across sub-filesystems), and it gives you a clear-cut thing for the backup to be equivalent to. Also keeping snapshots around locally lets you recover accidentally deleted files without reference to your backup media, which can be convenient. -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
