Backup Prox OS upon mirror zfs installation

ieronymous

Active Member
Apr 1, 2019
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Hi

Since I still havent found a more convenient-easy (at least for me) way to backup the OS which resides on a mirror zfs 2 ssd disk configuration , I thought to post my way and possibly have a feedback for an additional way that would be possible for my configuration. (Please don t mention the way that someone just copies important files such as /etc/ .....).

The way I do it (takes time to start with) is with RescueZilla. I shut down the Node, insert a usb with RescueZilla and boot from it. From the wizard screen I pick up the make backup option which option gives you the opportunity to make a raw backup of the whole ssd (good thing is that on the external drive you also need to have plugged in the required space is only the amount it currently the OS has. Doesnt work the other way around though...means cant restore it to a smaller drive than the initial one - in case of drive failure).
The problem in this part of the wizard is the you have 2 SSDs and at this time you can just pick one of them and not both (which makes sense) My first wrong of course attempts having me pick one of the disks (by the way since they are the same they had exactly the same id name with the difference at the suffix # disk1 # disk2. For both there was the description zfs member). Making the long story short, took a backup and afterwards booted up the server and made some of the pending updates. Right away run again Resuezilla and revert the one disk only to his previous condition (without having the updates installed). Bottom line is I ended up with degraded zpool.
Lesson learned and gave it a second shot. This time I run Rescuezilla twice (one for each ssd - zfs member), powered on the server, installed the updates and shut it down. Run Rescuezila again twice and restore the images to each corresponsive drive. Booted up voila.... prompted again to install new updates.

If you made up reading the post until here you can also understand why I need a quicker way

PS In a server with usb 3 ports it needs 12-15 mins for each SSD and 5-7.5 mins for restoration for each drive. If you have usb 2 then it takes up to an hour even for restoration.
 
Rescuezilla dev here. Your approach sounds alright, especially since it sounds like the ZFS drives are not active when the backup was made.

I believe there may be a smart way using ZFS to export snapshots of a (live?) filesystem. But I'm not sure, I don't have much experience with ZFS. People with more knowledge of ZFS can suggest if there's smarter built-in ZFS ways to achieve the backup image you're trying to create.

As for Rescuezilla, I am hoping to add the ability to backup multiple drives in one go to the next version (Rescuezilla v2.3). This will save time when creating backups of multiple drives. But I am still intending the user-interface around restoring to be separate for each image for simplicity.
 
Rescuezilla dev here. Your approach sounds alright, especially since it sounds like the ZFS drives are not active when the backup was made.

I believe there may be a smart way using ZFS to export snapshots of a (live?) filesystem. But I'm not sure, I don't have much experience with ZFS. People with more knowledge of ZFS can suggest if there's smarter built-in ZFS ways to achieve the backup image you're trying to create.

As for Rescuezilla, I am hoping to add the ability to backup multiple drives in one go to the next version (Rescuezilla v2.3). This will save time when creating backups of multiple drives. But I am still intending the user-interface around restoring to be separate for each image for simplicity.
Thanks for bothering to answer. I really appreciate this, Truth is I use your product extensively whenever I need images of disks. Nice thing that you implement the option to choose which partition to be backed up. The only way I can think of to make that happen for dual drives members of a software raid is to be able to store the info somewhere in the backup (in order for that info to be used afterwards at the restoration process) informing the program which disk (by id and not my name sda,sdb..etc) has what image and giving the opportunity during restore for that image to be deployed to the corresponding disks. It can only happen with mirror raids. i cant think of a way in a raid1/2/3 to be able the program to decide where image should go.
Sorry for being of topic, but I didnt expect your presence here, I was surprized.

PS By the way I tried a month ago to back up a pfsense drive and got errors which stopped the procedure. The file system of the pfsense was ufs if I can recall, Since we can go way off topic here if you need any info about that please pm me.

Thanks again
 
Yeah, selecting all drives (eg, /dev/sda, /dev/sdb etc) and then listing all partitions on the partition selection page should be fine. I'll add the ability to display serial numbers and model numbers in the next version.

Yes, I am interested in the backup of a UFS filesystem displaying an error. I'll PM you.
 
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