[OpenIndiana-discuss] About zpools and usage plan

[Hugh McIntyre]

On 8/3/13 1:45 PM, Martin Frost wrote:
> David, your advice to back up data regularly is good, but rsync'ing
> from one array to another is not the same as backing up.  I don't know
> how often you rsync, but right after you do, you can't restore a file
> you accidentally deleted or clobbered yesterday.  At most you have one
> previous version of the dataset available.

Rsync with --backup-dir=/incremental/2013-08-04:16:00 or similar gives 
you incremental data though.  I.e. one live version of the latest data 
and then incremental diffs date-by-date.

Or you can use snapshots if the backup system supports them and you 
prefer your data that way.

Which option you prefer depends on intended usage -- snapshots are 
probably better when files get renamed (rsync will make a copy of the 
data, snapshots will not) but rsync lets you delete individual files 
from the backup while keeping others, which you can't so easily do with 
non-editable snapshots.

Hugh.