backing up zfs dataset

[Johannes Totz]

On 25/11/2011 00:07, Freddie Cash wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Andrew Reilly<areilly at bigpond.net.au>wrote:
>
>> I do think that backup is something of a weakness for ZFS at
>> the moment.  Sure, live filesystems and snapshots are clearly
>> cool, and the modern way and all, but there is an awful lot of
>> flexibility and ease of undersanding in the model of a "backup
>> file on a tape."  Doesn't have to be on a tape, but the moral
>> equivalent to dump/restore would (in my book) be a wonderful
>> addition to ZFS, if anyone felt inclined.  Just padding the
>> send/receive serialisation format with enough checksum and
>> restart information to allow detection and graceful recovery
>> from read errors in the backup medium would do the job.
>
>
> One could probably work around this by doing a zfs send to a file, then
> running it through parchive [1] to generate all the redundancy data.
>   Granted, I've never used par, so it may or may not be feasible.
>
> [1] http://parchive.sourceforge.net

yeah, was thinking of doing that at some stage. but then send/receive 
format is not guaranteed to be stable (has anybody done any tests on 
this? try a v1 send with a v28 receive?).