zfs discuss - Nov 2007 - ZFS snapshot send/receive via intermediate device

Hey folks,

I have no knowledge at all about how streams work in Solaris, so this might have
a simple answer, or be completely impossible.  Unfortunately I''m a
windows admin so haven''t a clue which :)

We''re looking at rolling out a couple of ZFS servers on our network,
and instead of tapes we''re considering using off-site NAS boxes for
backups.  We think there''s likely to be too much data each day to send
the incremental snapshots to the remote systems over the wire, so we''re
wondering if we can use removable disks instead to transport just the
incremental changes.

The idea is that we can do the initial "zfs send" on-site with the NAS
plugged on the network, and from then on we just need a 500GB removable disk to
take the changes off site each night.

Let me be clear on that:  We''re not thinking of storing the whole zfs
pool on the removable disk, there''s just too much data.  Instead, we
want to use "zfs send -i" to store just the incremental changes on a
removable disk, so we can then take that disk home and plug it into another
device and use zfs receive to upload the changes.  Does anybody know if
that''s possible?

If it works it''s a nice and simple off-site backup, with the added
benefit that we have a very rapid disaster recovery response.  No need to waste
time restoring from tape:  the off-site backup can be brought onto the network
and data is accessible immediately.
 
 
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Simple answer yes.

Slightly longer answer.

zfs send just writes to stdout where you put that is upto your needs, 
can can be a file in some filesystem, a raw disk, a tape, a pipe to 
another program (such as ssh or compress or encrypt)....

zfs recv reads from stdin so just do the reverse of what you did for send.

--
Darren J Moffat