Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Suggestions for backup scheme?

[Michael <confabulate@kintzios.com>]

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On Friday, 2 February 2024 23:39:18 GMT Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2024-01-31, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > Honestly, at this point I would not run any storage I cared about on
> > anything but zfs.  There are just so many benefits.
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > In any case, these COW filesystems, much like git, store data in a
> > way that makes it very efficient to diff two snapshots and back up
> > only the data that has changed. [...]
> 
> In order to take advantage of this, I assume that the backup
> destination and source both have to be ZFS? Do backup source and
> destination need to be in the same filesystem? Or volume? Or Pool?
> (I'm not clear on how those differ exactly.) Or can the backup
> destination be "unrelated" to the backup source? The primary source of
> failure in my world is definitely hardware failure of the disk drive,
> so my backup destination is always a separate physical (usually
> external) disk drive.

TBH using ext4/xfs/f2fs/etc. on the host plus an incremental backup method on 
any other fs of choice on external storage is IMHO a better method for a 
laptop.  Unless your data is changing continuously and you need incremental 
backups every 5 minutes what you use is well suited to your use case.


> If you'll forgive the analogy, we'll say the the functionality of
> rsync (as used by rsnapshot) is built-in to ZFS.

Broadly and rather loosely yes, by virtue of the COW and snapshot fs 
architecture and the btrfs/zfs send-receive commands.


> Is there an
> application that does with ZFS snapshots what the rsnapshot
> application itself does with rsync?

COW filesystems do not need a 3rd party application.  They come with their own 
commands which can be called manually, or scripted for convenience and 
automation.  Various people have created their own scripts and applications, 
e.g.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/696513/best-strategy-to-backup-btrfs-root-filesystem


> I googled for ZFS backup applications, but didn't find anything that
> seemed to be widespread and "supported" the way that rsnapshot is.
> 
> --
> Grant

There must be quite a few scripts out there, but can't say what support they 
may receive.  Random search revealed:

https://www.zfsnap.org/

https://github.com/shirkdog/zfsbackup

https://gbyte.dev/blog/simple-zfs-snapshotting-replicating-backup-rotating-convenience-bash-script

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