Backups and disaster recovery

spi spi at nurfuerspam.de
Sun Dec 4 10:16:13 UTC 2022


Am 04.12.22 um 04:16 schrieb Sam Kuper:
> You might want to consider using ZFS.


ZFS has some great advantages, like scheduled scrub runs against bit
rot. Not only one can create snapshots and replicate them to a different
(even remote) ZFS pool but that is even possible with an encrypted pool
without disclosing the encryption password.

So you can synch file system changes to like a remote location with the
file system pool in the remote location being encrypted. You don't need
to mount the remote file systems and disclose the password, you just
send encrpted ZFS data to the remote location. With that approach you
can store the remote backups even in less trusted environments (from a
confidentiality not availability point of view).


My sdbox mailboxes are stored in ZFS volumes. I run snapshots daily and
back them up. I tried to restore single mailboxes or even single mailbox
folders. It all worked so far - still I wonder if there might be any
issues with snapshotting a file system rather than using 'doveadm
backup'. With databases I flush/dump/whatever them so it it safe to
snapshot their volume.

--
Cheers
spi



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