Thinking of using ZFS/FBSD for a backup system

[aslam_mohamed at wordbank.com]

Thanks for your reply. I did get some weired messages like ' vdev 
failure'  just two days before the ZFS pool disappeared, but I don't 
know whether this is from ZFS or another GEOM issue. I shut the machine 
down and restarted everything back and got it to do the sync again. 
Later I noticed zpool status was showing some big numbers like (83, 90 
...) on checksum column. I did the zpool clear and it cleared the 
numbers. Then I think couple days later the sync process stopped in the 
middle. When I investigated it, I found that zpool status is not there. 
I think the firewire/FreeBSD could be a potential contributor to this 
problem. Now I am trying to recover the backup data (if there is any in 
external disks!!) by connecting the external disks to SUN Solaris and 
getting the SUN/ZFS to see the pool!!!.. I cant think of any other ways 
to recover the backup!!!..

Aslam

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> aslam_mohamed at wordbank.com wrote:
>> Hi,
>> I have been using FreeBSD/ZFS for our backup system for last few 
>> months.. We had 6TB external disks connected through Firewire to the 
>> Server. Last week all the backup data disappeared along with the pool 
>> and everything!!!..When I typed zpool status - it says no pool 
>> available..Build up to this incident has always been a firefighting 
>> situation for me. We use Rsync to sync all the servers to FreeBSD's 
>> ZFS pool everyday. Most of the time Rsync hung on the middle of the 
>> syncing process.  When this happen I have to restart the server to 
>> run the backup again and  mount the ZFS pool (it requires manual 
>> mounting most of the time!!). Sometimes it throws some error like -
>> GEOM: da0: corrupt or invalid GPT detected.
>> GEOM: da0: GPT rejected -- may not be recoverable.
>> GEOM: da1: corrupt or invalid GPT detected.
>> GEOM: da1: GPT rejected -- may not be recoverable
>> I don't know what caused the disappearance of the ZFS pool and if 
>> someone could explain how I can retrieve the data from the external 
>> disks, that would be really helpful?..
>
> What you pasted says that the disks were rejected by GEOM because the 
> partition table was "corrupt or invalid".  I don't know for sure why 
> this might be, but one possible cause would be if there is data 
> corruption in your I/O path.  Do you get errors from ZFS about 
> checksum failures or other errors?  Maybe there is a problem with the 
> firewire stack, or support for your firewire hardware.
>
> The rsync hanging is almost certainly either for the same memory 
> reasons we have been discussing, or a side effect of I/O problems to 
> the disks.
>
> Kris
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