[OpenIndiana-discuss] rsync & snapshot backups?

[Dan Swartzendruber]

Actually, my previous backup system *was* amanda.  I ran it on the ubuntu
server, backing up itself and a centos5 server, using vtapes, with the
storage for those being either an NFS or iSCSI volume on a NAS.  The only
bad thing about that is the dumps take awhile to run, and restoring
something is a bit of a nuisance (although having the amanda indexing makes
it easy to know what "tapes" are needed. For that matter, the amrecover
program will tell you which tapes to load in which order - this happens if
you are reloading a directory with files that have been backed up to
different tapes.  That seems like the one weak point with rsync/zfs - there
is no clean way to track all that info.  What I mean is: if I need to
recover /foo/bar/blah from server X, copy
/tank/backups/serverX/.zfs/snap-XXX/foo/bar/blah and you are good to go.
OTOH, if you want the entire directory /foo/bar, you might need to copy from
several different snapshots.  The rolling snapshot idea works fine, except I
need to add some sort of code to expire the "oldest" snaps.