Thinking of using ZFS/FBSD for a backup system

[Kris Kennaway]

aslam_mohamed at wordbank.com wrote:
> 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!!!..

It probably should have set off alarms for you when you first started 
seeing checksum failures.  That indicates a serious problem!  At this 
point, it sounds like your data might be highly corrupted, and 
unfortunately, perhaps too corrupted to recover.

Kris