zfs send/receive as dump/restore alternative

[Matthew Seaman]

On 2016/11/14 09:42, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> What if I have not enough space to expand the whole datastream as a
> filesystem? My replication stream package is 119G large at the moment
> one one server, I have neither free space nor spare time to expand the
> whole of it into an altroot.

Yeah.  You don't store the stream data as one big file, but you expand
it out to a filesystem on receipt.  That /shouldn't/ require very much
more space than storing it as one big file.

> If I have a complete replication stream package, can I "zfs recv" a
> single dataset from it? It would be silly to expand the whole pool to
> extract a couple of files from zroot/usr/home/johndoe/docs 

No -- I don't think this is possible.  If you want to be able to restore
individual datasets, then you need to zfs send individual datasets.

> So if you ever get to restore several files and don't have enough
> space to receive the whole stream, what would you do?
> 
> With restore or tar you can always do a partial extract.

Yes.  ZFS is neither restore nor tar, and behaves differently.  If you
want a backup that behaves like a tar archive, then you could simply use
tar(1) for your backups...

	Cheers,

	Matthew


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