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Thanks for the suggestions. I'm more inclined to use Open Source solutions, though, which Tivoli and Legato are not. I agree with ZFS but I think it shines as

by drKarl 12y ago

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm more inclined to use Open Source solutions, though, which Tivoli and Legato are not. I agree with ZFS but I think it shines as a last resort backup (like rsync.net offers) and not as a main backup system since it doesn't do incremental and deduplication and so on...

BozeWolf 12y ago
Snapshots can be incremental, right? Just don't 'chain' too many snapshots of snapshots.
rsync 12y ago
I am not sure I understand your comment, but just to be clear: we (rsync.net) have ZFS snapshots enabled in your account, by default. You can request any schedule of days/weeks/months you want, and their (very small) space usage counts against your paid quota. The first 7 dailies are always free (don't count). What this means is you can just do a dumb rsync to us. No incrementals, no expiring datasets, no logic at all - just rsync to us every night and our snapshot rotation schedule does the rest for you. Just browse right in (using the SSH/SFTP based tool of your choice[1]) and grab a file from 6 days ago. Email us and ask about the HN readers discount for new customers. [1] Like filezilla, or SSHFS, or our windows drive mapper
acd 12y ago
ZFS is a also a good way to get consistent fast backups of databases by snapshotting. By ZFS copy-on-write its incremental by nature as it you only have to send over deltas incremental streams. Thus for site-to-site backups its usually very fast! Another advantage compared to rsync is that you do not need to directory traverse the whole file system in order to find the differences, I believe its similar to BTRFS in that aspect. Then there is the feature that ZFS has checksums, so that when you write to disk you know what you get otherwise you can get corruption. RAID5-60 for me is a gamble that you can get hidden write disk errors unless there is checksums in software on a higher layer. Always scrub your ZFS source and backup pool.

by drKarl 12y ago

BozeWolf 12y ago

Snapshots can be incremental, right? Just don't 'chain' too many snapshots of snapshots.

rsync 12y ago

I am not sure I understand your comment, but just to be clear: we (rsync.net) have ZFS snapshots enabled in your account, by default. You can request any schedule of days/weeks/months you want, and their (very small) space usage counts against your paid quota. The first 7 dailies are always free (don't count). What this means is you can just do a dumb rsync to us. No incrementals, no expiring datasets, no logic at all - just rsync to us every night and our snapshot rotation schedule does the rest for you. Just browse right in (using the SSH/SFTP based tool of your choice[1]) and grab a file from 6 days ago. Email us and ask about the HN readers discount for new customers. [1] Like filezilla, or SSHFS, or our windows drive mapper

acd 12y ago

ZFS is a also a good way to get consistent fast backups of databases by snapshotting. By ZFS copy-on-write its incremental by nature as it you only have to send over deltas incremental streams. Thus for site-to-site backups its usually very fast! Another advantage compared to rsync is that you do not need to directory traverse the whole file system in order to find the differences, I believe its similar to BTRFS in that aspect. Then there is the feature that ZFS has checksums, so that when you write to disk you know what you get otherwise you can get corruption. RAID5-60 for me is a gamble that you can get hidden write disk errors unless there is checksums in software on a higher layer. Always scrub your ZFS source and backup pool.