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.
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.
