RE: Backups to disk

From: Matt Churchyard <matt_at_userve.net>
Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2021 08:08:45 UTC
Do you mean you created a second zfs pool? A pool can contain multiple filesystems. 
Judging by the command you give it looks like you have two pools called "archive" and "backup", which by default will contain a single filesystem (dataset) with the same name, mounted on /{name}.

If that's the exact command you used then the recv argument is wrong. It should be the dataset name, not a path. (i.e. drop the first slash if you want the backup stored in a dataset called 08252021 on the backup pool)

Personally, assuming you are backing up the primary dataset on the "archive" pool, I would just do something like the following -

zfs snapshot archive@08252021
zfs send archive@08252021 | zfs recv backup/archive

Then the next day (as long as you still have the 08252021 snapshot) -

zfs snapshot backup@08262021
zfs send -i 08252021 archive@08262021 | zfs recv backup/archive

This will send only the changes, and you can always look through the snapshots on the backup pool to see the list of snapshots and dates. Creating a backup dataset using the date doesn't make a lot of sense, to me at least. After this you can delete the 08252021 snapshot on the archive pool unless you have any specific reason to want to keep it. If the backup pool was on a separate system then it often makes sense to keep some snapshots so you can easily recover files on the live system without having to pull them from backup. If the backup pool is in the same system then there's not really any point.

Matt

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-fs@freebsd.org <owner-freebsd-fs@freebsd.org> On Behalf Of joe mcguckin
Sent: 27 August 2021 00:29
To: freebsd-fs <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>
Subject: Backups to disk

I created a second zfs filesystem to be used as backups. I made a snapshot and tried zfs send archive@08252021 | zfs recv /backup/08252021.

This fails with Freebsd complaining that zfs recv got a signal and aborted.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Joe


Joe McGuckin
ViaNet Communications

joe@via.net
650-207-0372 cell
650-213-1302 office
650-969-2124 fax