Musings on ZFS Backup strategies

[Daniel Eischen]

On Fri, 1 Mar 2013, kpneal at pobox.com wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 12:23:31PM -0500, Daniel Eischen wrote:
>> Yes, we still use a couple of DLT autoloaders and have nightly
>> incrementals and weekly fulls.  This is the problem I have with
>> converting to ZFS.  Our typical recovery is when a user says
>> they need a directory or set of files from a week or two ago.
>> Using dump from tape, I can easily extract *just* the necessary
>> files.  I don't need a second system to restore to, so that
>> I can then extract the file.
>>
>> dump (and ufsdump for our Solaris boxes) _just work_, and we
>> can go back many many years and they will still work.  If we
>> convert to ZFS, I'm guessing we'll have to do nightly
>> incrementals with 'tar' instead of 'dump' as well as doing
>> ZFS snapshots for fulls.
>
> What about extended attributes? ACLs? Are those saved by tar?

I think tar (as root or -p) will attempt to preserve those.

-- 
DE