[OpenIndiana-discuss] Last change in zfs filesystem

[Richard Elling]

On Sep 25, 2012, at 4:19 AM, Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> wrote:

> 2012-09-25 11:52, Armin Maier wrote:
>> Hello, is there an easy way wo find out when the last update occured to
>> an zfs filesystem, my goal is to only make a backup of a filesystem when
>> something has changed. At this time i make it in a command pipe with
>> "find ... | sort ... | head | awk" what takes a lot of time if the
>> filesystem holds a lot of files.
> 
> As an idea, I think it may be possible to use (and script-wrap)
> the ZDB (ZFS DeBugger) to get the last TXG and maybe timestamp
> of the ZFS dataset's root block update, roughly like this (as
> root; use pfexec/sudo for non-roots):
> 
> # zdb -dddddd rpool/export/home 0

zdb is not intended to be used for tasks other than debugging or development.
It is not a good idea to try and use it as a production tool.

> Dataset rpool/export/home [ZPL], ID 76, cr_txg 51, 5.41M, 11 objects, rootbp DVA[0]=<0:a41b73a00:200> DVA[1]=<0:262216a00:200> [L0 DMU objset] fletcher4 lzjb LE contiguous unique double size=800L/200P birth=1472850L/1472850P fill=11 cksum=129a921cc8:63da9a79406:11b5c24f24f25:23431dd69d5e29
> 
>    Object  lvl   iblk   dblk  dsize  lsize   %full  type
>         0    7    16K    16K    16K    16K   34.38  DMU dnode (K=inherit) (Z=inherit)
>        dnode flags: USED_BYTES
>        dnode maxblkid: 0
> Indirect blocks:
>               0 L6       0:a41b69600:400 0:261d98a00:400 4000L/400P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
>               0  L5      0:a41b68e00:400 0:261d94200:400 4000L/400P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
>               0   L4     0:a41b68600:400 0:261d93a00:400 4000L/400P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
>               0    L3    0:a41b67e00:400 0:261d93200:400 4000L/400P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
>               0     L2   0:a41b67600:400 0:261d90e00:400 4000L/400P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
>               0      L1  0:a41b67200:400 0:261d90a00:400 4000L/400P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
>               0       L0 0:a415b5800:800 0:260715a00:800 4000L/800P F=11 B=1472850/1472850
> 
>                segment [0000000000000200, 0000000000001800) size 5.50K
> 
> I limited the output (and time consumption) by specifying an object
> which always exists (inode #0); you can further limit the parsing by
> taking just the first line (zdb ... | head -1).
> In particular, above we can see that the "birth TXG numbers" of the
> current block instance are 1472850 for logical assignment and physical
> write to disk.

This doesn't really answer the OP's question.

> If I'm not mistaken, any update to any object in the filesystem
> should change its block pointer tree upwards to pool uberblock,
> passing through the dataset's "root block". Note this may also
> include updates from just accessing dirs/files if your atime=on
> (as it is by default), as well as creation of snapshots.
> 
> Also note that running ZDB on a live pool is discouraged in the
> docs, because it does not guarantee consistency (things may
> change while ZDB is collecting data).

Correct, it is a bad idea to propose zdb's use in this manner.

KISS, use the tools that have been traditionally used to solve this problem: directory
walkers like find and rsync, or zfs diff.
 -- richard

--
illumos Day & ZFS Day, Oct 1-2, 2012 San Fransisco 
www.zfsday.com
Richard.Elling at RichardElling.com
+1-760-896-4422