Snapshots fail on large FFS2 volumes regulary -- how to backup /usr/home?!

[Lev Serebryakov]

Hello, Kirk.
You wrote 20 мая 2011 г., 7:16:06:

> Given the size of your storage, you should consider using ZFS
> which is better able to handle such large systems better.
  Yes, I know, that everybody loves ZFS now, but it doesn't have two
 characteristics which is important for my installation:

  (1) nodump flag or any other way to mark directories and files as
  not-importand for backup. "zfs send" is all-or-nothing solution, and
  now my users use "nodump" to reduce backup sizes greatly.

  (2) Incremental backups with a little of local information (zfs send
  can send difference between snapshots, but system needs to store old
  snapshot for this).

  Second one is not so important yet, because there is a lot of free space,
  but "zfs send" could not do anything with (1) :(

    All other backups solutions doesn't store full FS information, as
  works on file level, not FS one :(

> My second suggestion is that you try building UFS2 with 32K
> blocks and 4K fragments. That will reduce the number of resources
> needed to take the snapshot.
  I'll try this. But I remember, that some time ago (about 7.1-STABLE)
 there was deadlock in kernel memory allocator when different UFSes
 on system uses different block sizes...

-- 
// Black Lion AKA Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>