FreeBSD UFS/ZFS Snapshot Management Environment (20071111.1)

[Ralf S. Engelschall]

Based on various feedback I've now improved my FreeBSD Snapshot
Management environment (people.freebsd.org/~rse/snapshot/).
The new version 20071111.1 is now available.

In the past this was an abstraction layer for UFS snapshots only. Now
it is an abstraction layer for both UFS and ZFS snapshot management and
this way allows one to deal with snapshots during daily work independent
whether one works on UFS or ZFS.

To recap, this abstraction layer mainly provides three aspects:

1. common snapshot management frontend snapshot(8) for creating,
   destroying, listing, mounting, unmounting and temporarily visiting
   snapshots manually.

2. optional, automatic, periodic and flexible backup snapshot creation
   via periodic-snapshot(8) and a /etc/periodic.conf configuration,
   modeled after the NetApp Data ONTAP "snap sched" syntax.

3. optional, abstracted and easy access to backup snapshot data via
   amd(8) and the /snap hierarchy (not a big deal for ZFS but important
   for convenient access to UFS snapshots).

The full functionality requires FreeBSD 7 or 8, of course. But FreeBSD 5
and 6 or also supported through the reduced UFS-only functionality.

To get started:

   # download and installation
   $ cd /tmp
   $ fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/dist/freebsd-snapshot-20071111.1.tar.gz
   $ tar xzf freebsd-snapshot-20071111.1.tar.gz
   $ cd freebsd-snapshot-20071111.1
   $ make install
   $ /etc/rc.d/amd start # OPTIONAL

   # just play with it by reading the details under
   # http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/snapshot/
   $ [...]

   # deinstallation and cleanup
   $ cd /tmp/freebsd-snapshot-20071111.1
   $ make uninstall
   $ cd ..
   $ rm -rf freebsd-snapshot-20071111.1*

Happy snapshooting... ;-)

--
rse at FreeBSD.org                        Ralf S. Engelschall
FreeBSD.org/~rse                       rse at engelschall.com
FreeBSD committer                      www.engelschall.com