VERY frustrated with FreeBSD/UFS stability - please help or comment...

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Gore Jarold <gore_jarold at yahoo.com> writes:
> Specifically, I have private departmental fileservers that other
> fileservers rsync to using Mike Rubel-style rsync snapshots:
>
> http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/
>
> This means that the remote system runs a script like this:
>
> ssh user at host rm -rf backup.2
> ssh user at host mv backup.1 backup.2
> ssh user at host cp -al backup.0 backup.1
> rsync /files user at host:/backup.0

This is extremely inefficient, as you have discovered.

Speaking in the abstract, what you want to do every day is the
following:

client1% rsync --archive --delete /vol server:/backup/client1
client2% rsync --archive --delete /vol server:/backup/client2
server% for vol in /backup/* ; do mksnap_ffs $vol $vol/.snap/`date` ; done

No copying or deleting; you take a snapshot when the rsync job is done,
and the next day you rsync again to the same directory; only what has
actually changed will be transferred, and there is no need to create and
populate full copies of each directory tree every time.

The easiest way to do this (if you're not afraid to run experimental
code) is to use ZFS on the server, as it lets you easily create separate
file systems for each client, and creates and maintains snapshots far
more cheaply than FFS.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no