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Zrepl – ZFS replication
- harvie 3y agoI have rather nice experience with ZnapZend https://www.znapzend.org/ https://www.znapzend.org/ Only issue i've found is the fact there is no official Debian repository and i always do forget to recompile it after upgrading Debian :-D I really like the configuration system integrated in ZFS set/get...
- rsync 3y agozrepl works perfectly with an rsync.net account as a target: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014969 Here's a nice summary someone wrote: https://blog.lenny.ninja/zrepl-on-rsync-net.html https://blog.lenny.ninja/zrepl-on-rsync-net.html
- contingencies 3y agoHow timely... literally spent the last hour attempting to recover data from 7 year old ZFS volumes. The conclusion was I think they must have been LVM'd or something before ZFS pool creation because cfdisk and hexdump -C show ZFS pool evidence but zpool-import won't scan them for love nor money. Only other option is an older-than-thou ZFS kernel module version with breaking changes. Sigh. Calling it a fail. No anticipated data of any weight and meaning, IIRC, but one likes to be thorough. Also had a dead 6TB hard disk this morning: WD60EZAZ. Tried replacing the PCB as I had a few functional ones (ex RAID array), happened to have the right security bit, but no dice. You can hear it try to take-off repeatedly but it never achieves altitude. It's been awhile!
- dshdsh 3y agoHm... According to commit activity and high number of issues, looks like this project is almost dead. Anyway I tried to use it once and I got an impression it's too complicated and unreliable. I don't remember any details.
- tamimio 3y agoOff topic: This is a great example why github stars don’t mean anything, such a great tool like this is ~600 while other repos that are basically toys compared to this have ~12k stars!
- mekster 3y agoCan you be more specific? What makes this so much better than others?
- r1ch 3y agoFor me one of the key features is the integrated TLS server, so my backups can be transferred over the internet at decent speeds. Tools based on SSH all suffer from the SSH window limit and will never reach high speeds over the internet.
- sgarland 3y agoI missed that when I was comparing them - good point. Right now my ZFS backups are on the same LAN, and stuff going off-site isn’t using send/recv, but this is an excellent point.
- havnagiggle 3y agoYou have just blown my mind. I can't believe I did not consider this before. Much thanks!
- candiddevmike 3y agoI can't find anything about this SSH window limit, or really anything around SSH being slower than TLS, aside from a limit to the number of concurrent sessions. Any links?
- r1ch 3y agohttps://www.psc.edu/hpn-ssh-home/hpn-ssh-faq/ https://www.psc.edu/hpn-ssh-home/hpn-ssh-faq/
- jeffalyanak 3y agoZFS already includes all the functionality and commands you would need for replication—you _could_ do it yourself with snapshot, bookmark, send, and receive—but Zrepl is such a great way to define/manage it that it's always on my list of must-have ZFS tools.
- 3np 3y agoI opened a couple of issues and did some minor contributions in the past and at every point problame has been approachable and a pleasure to interact with. From a user perspective, I'm still feeling a lack of UX in restoration/clone-management from the snapshots synced by zrepl - things can easily get messy if you don't know exactly what you're doing and keep track of things properly. That might be out of scope for zrepl itself, though. Some more proactive/pre-emptive pruning would also be great - falling behind on syncing can be downright painful if you don't pay attention... Which is just to say, don't skip setting up some basic monitoring with alerts for production loads (: Either way, all things considered zrepl is the nicest zfs replication option I found so far.
- tomatocracy 3y agoIf you haven't already seen it, for restoring files/browsing different snapshots etc, httm is great: https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm https://github.com/kimono-koans/httm
- baggiponte 3y agoI did not understand what is ZFS - could anyone be so kind to explain?
- voxadam 3y agoZFS is an advanced file system with integrated multi-device volume management. It was originally designed and implemented by Sun Microsystems for their Unix operating system Solaris. The copyright for the original codebase is now owned by Oracle and has since been closed up and made proprietary software. Prior to Oracle's acquisition of Sun, ZFS was made open source under the CDDL as part of OpenSolaris, that code was forked and it gave rise to OpenZFS which is used by many Linux and BSD users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS https://openzfs.org https://openzfs.org
- chasil 3y agoHere are a couple of introductions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25157491 https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/zfs-linux https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/zfs-linux
- ilyt 3y agoIt's like someone glued together LVM and RAID but on file level instead of block level. So you can make some fancy things like (relatively) cost-free snapshots, and some extra data safety with per-file checksumming. It also uses WAL (similarly to databases) which allows (similiar to databases) replication to remote system.
- edmundsauto 3y agoGot it, that makes sense! Not OP but a followup - what does "replication" mean in this context? Is it mirroring your ZFS volumes in another device?
- ilyt 3y agoPretty much, although it's one-directional transfer of a volume or snapshot of one, not bi-directional one
- AndroTux 3y agoI started using ZFS a few years ago. Before that I didn't know that I could develop such a strong feeling towards a file system. But here we are. In my mind, it really revolutionized the meaning of file system. It feels like much more than that, especially when compared to something like NTFS or ext4.
- HankB99 3y agoDisclaimer: I'm a huge fan of ZFS. ZFS is much more than just a filesystem and related tools. It also supports backup/restore and disk partitioning and partitioning of data via filesystems (not AFAIK available with EXT4.) And probably other things I either don;t know about or have forgotten to mention.
- cryptonector 3y agoZFS is life-altering.
- lprd 3y agoSimilar story here (truenas was a gateway drug). There are a few up and coming filesystems that I have my eye on. But by and large, ZFS has remained my favorite.
- imiric 3y agoI've been curious about ZFS ever since it became stable in Linux, but haven't made the jump yet because a) I have an irrational fear of data loss, and ext4 has never failed me, and b) I have an aversion towards complexity, and ZFS is much more complex than ext4. Features like snapshots and checksumming can be accomplished with userspace tools, though in arguably less elegant ways, so I didn't have a strong need for it either. That said, it's great reading its success stories and praises, and my next system will use ZFS. :)
- tombert 3y agoPotential complexity is higher with ZFS, but in regards to RAID and the like, I honestly find the zpool tools to be much easier to work with than their mdadm equivalents. I have a "ghetto NAS" of 24 drives plugged into my server via USB, and getting a raidz3 set up on there was one command: `zpool create tank raidz3 drive1 drive2 drive3 ....` Doing scrubs and replacing disks are pretty easy, just using `scrub` and `replace` commands with zpool. I haven't really felt the need to leave ZFS, at least not in regards to RAIDs; on root I still use ext4, though I might change to btrfs on my next install.
- ZeWaren 3y agoI'm using zrepl to sync ZFS filesystems incrementally between servers. I like the ability to incrementally send only the changes of an encrypted filesystem to a target server that never had the encryption key at anytime. I'm using this to share backup space with my friends. We both push/pull our encrypted snapshot diffs every hour. I don't have my friends' keys so I can't read their data, and they can't read mine. In case of emergency, I can go to their place with my key, and recover my data from their systems.
- HankB99 3y agoHave you used sanoid/syncoid? I started my ZFS journey with a custom script and then switched to syncoid/sanoid (and some much simplified scripts) for my backup needs. One of my use cases is for Raspberry Pis which seem to have a habit of becoming unbootable. These are Pi 4Bs running from SATA/USB SSD or CM4s using NVME SSDs. I have scripts that use * dd to copy the boot sector (to a ZFS filesystem) * rsync to copy the boot (FAT32) and root (EXT4) partitions (also to a ZFS filesystem) * syncoid to copy the ZFS filesystem to another host. This process runs daily. When a system craps, it's pretty straightforward to restore the boot sector and boot and root partitions and finally the ZFS pool. I'm curious zrepl does that might be useful for me.
- ZeWaren 3y agoI don't need to backup my boot sectors or root partitions since all my systems are provisioned. I can always re-create them with scripts, should any of them fail. I'm only replicating the data filesystems. From what I see, sanoid looks quite similar to zrepl. Both tools are probably able to achieve similar results. I do feel that zrepl has more features so far, though. But hey, if your setup is working and your data is secure, that's the most important.
- amar0c 3y agoI do not see benefit using this over Sanoid/Syncoid. This smells 'complicated' comparing two
- ewwhite 3y agoSyncoid is the way. Zrepl was more fraught in my use cases and significantly more complicated.
- mdtancsa 3y agoreally excellent software I have been using for a long time to manage snapshots!