Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

[Jasse Jansson]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 8:10 AM, Bill Hacker wrote:

Freddie Cash wrote:
On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Csaba Henk <csaba.henk at creo.hu>  
wrote:
I need to setup a backup machine, and I intend to utilize today's
snapshotty filesystems (which boils down to Dfly+Hammer or FBSD 
+ZFS --
btrfs is not there yet, and I don't feel like dwelving into  
Solaris).
Set up such an OS with such an fs, and backup by syncing to the
snapshotty fs and create a snapshot.

I wonder about the following things:

1) Any idea how does this approach scale related to more  
conventional solutions,
like rdiff-backup or dump(8)? I see the the pros, but are there any
cons? How effective is taking regular snapshots space-wise?

2) Is there any practical argument for choosing between Dfly 
+Hammer and
FBSD+ZFS? (Feel free to give biased answers :) )

3) I'd like to encrypt stuff, either at device or fs level. For
FreeBSD there is geli(8). I haven't found anything for DragonFly.
Is there any way to get at it on DragonFly?
We do this at work, using FreeBSD 7.1 and ZFS, for backing up over 80
remote Linux and FreeBSD servers, and 1 Windows station.  We have two
servers, one that does the backups every night, and another that
mirrors the backups during the day.
*trimmed* (description of a quite decent ZFS approach)

After the initial rsync of a server, which can take several days  
as it
can easily max out an ADSL link's upload bandwidth, the daily run
takes about 6 hours, most of which is waiting for rsync to generate
the file listing.

*snipped*

But there we are, Startup 'seeding; is unavidable, but  
thereafter ... among other things, looking to reduce the reliance  
on rsync (and similar CVS'ish or git'ish techniques) having to  
'inventory' stuff at a high per-file level that a 'hammer mirror- 
stream' (or GMIRROR to networked RAID) could do 'as you go along'  
at a lower level - closer to the actual blocks as they are being  
written.

How, and how well, would ZFS handle redundant pools on separate sites?

And can that be a streaming process - even if that means the  
redundancy target is r/o for 'the duration', as a hammer slave  
would be?
I have not tried it myself, but there is a ZFS send/receive command,
that might do the trick.




Kaiser Jasse -- Authorized Stealth Oracle

The axioms of wisdom:
1. Go the SPARC way of life
2. You can't conquer the universe without the knowledge of FORTRAN
3. In the Unix realm, 10% of work fixes 90% of the problems