[CentOS] ZFS magic (was: Backup Redux)

Thu Dec 8 19:44:19 UTC 2011
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Thu, Dec 8, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote:
>> My non-tape solution of choice is definitely rsync => box with ZFS,
>> snapshot however often you'd like. => forever incrementals.
>>
>> For more redundancy and performance, add more ZFS boxes, do
>> replication between them.
>>
>>
>
> Not sure whether ZFS now makes this OT - if so, sorry for not putting "OT:"
> in the subject.
>
> Anyway, I have a ZFS storage unit here and this is my first exposure to it
> so I don't really know about any of this ZFS magic that I often hear about.
>  I'm sure I could google and find some reading on the matter but am
> wondering if anyone has some recommended reading that is concise and to the
> point, and will give me a good intro.

ZFS gives you several options missing in linux filesystems.  The ones
likely to be important for the filesystems holding backup archives
are:
  compression
  block-level de-dup
  snapshots
  incremental snapshot send/receive
  easy-to-expand  combined volume/raid management

Backuppc does compression and de-dups at the file level with hardlinks
so you get some of the missing features anyway, but it's not quite the
same.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com