Here is the problem I''m trying to solve... Ive been using a sparc machine as my primary home server for years. A few years back the motherboard died. I did a nightly backup on an external USB drive formatted in ufs format. I use a rsync based backup called dirvish, so I thought I had all the bases covered. I basically mount the USB drive, do the backup, and then unmount the drive. This guarantees that (except while it''s mounted) the backup filesystem is relatively safe from glitches. I quickly brought up an x86 machine but found it couldn''t read the ufs drive (endian issue). I tried Linux which claims it could read either endian ufs without success. So, I picked up another sparc machine to get me up and running again. However, I''m now in the same boat if it dies. Now I need to downgrade the sparc machine to Solaris 8 (work related reasons), so I migrated all my services to an Opteron Sunfire server running SCXR b49 with a zfs mirrored pool. However, root is on a non-mirrored ufs partition so I still would like to start the full backups onto the USB drive again. I want to avoid the ufs endian issue, so I figure that zfs is the right format to use on the drive. It''s not clear whether this is possible. I thought that using a zfs import/export into it''s own pool would work, but I wanted to run it through here for comments first. Then if the system dies, I can restore files quickly from any architecture server. BTW, zfs rocks! Gary This message posted from opensolaris.org
It is supposed to work, though I haven''t tried it. Gary Gendel wrote:> Here is the problem I''m trying to solve... > > Ive been using a sparc machine as my primary home server for years. A few years back the motherboard died. I did a nightly backup on an external USB drive formatted in ufs format. I use a rsync based backup called dirvish, so I thought I had all the bases covered. I basically mount the USB drive, do the backup, and then unmount the drive. This guarantees that (except while it''s mounted) the backup filesystem is relatively safe from glitches. > > I quickly brought up an x86 machine but found it couldn''t read the ufs drive (endian issue). I tried Linux which claims it could read either endian ufs without success. > > So, I picked up another sparc machine to get me up and running again. However, I''m now in the same boat if it dies. > > Now I need to downgrade the sparc machine to Solaris 8 (work related reasons), so I migrated all my services to an Opteron Sunfire server running SCXR b49 with a zfs mirrored pool. However, root is on a non-mirrored ufs partition so I still would like to start the full backups onto the USB drive again. > > I want to avoid the ufs endian issue, so I figure that zfs is the right format to use on the drive. It''s not clear whether this is possible. I thought that using a zfs import/export into it''s own pool would work, but I wanted to run it through here for comments first. Then if the system dies, I can restore files quickly from any architecture server. > > BTW, zfs rocks!Just plug it into your VW :-) -- richard
> I thought that using a zfs import/export into it''s own pool would work,It works for me, at least on recent builds. The only gotcha I''m aware of is that ZFS does not do well with I/O failures in a non-replicated pool - it used to panic when there was read failure on a single-disk USB pool, I don''t know if things changed since then. -Artem.