On January 29, 2010 1:19:33 AM -0500 Charles Sprickman spork@bway.net wrote:
Anyhow, if I find more places to run ZFS in production and it seems stable enough, I'd like to try getting it running on my big mailserver at some point. Backing up from UFS to ZFS using rsync is fine, but ZFS send/recv looks like a far more interesting backup solution.
Not for archival backups though. The zfs send stream is not guaranteed to be compatible with any other version of zfs than the one on the machine that generated it. Meaning if you have an archived send stream from 3 years ago and are trying to restore it onto a newer OS version, it might not work.
Of course you can archive the filesystem itself, if you are backing up to disk (that's what I do). Future versions of zfs ARE guaranteed to be able to read older zfs filesystems. But if you are saving the send stream onto tape or DVD or other media like that, as a stream, to restore it you MIGHT need an OS with the same version of zfs on it. zfs has already been through several versions, but I don't know what the compatibility of send streams between the versions are.
OK, we're really OT now! :)
-frank