[discuss] Backup strategy

[discuss] Backup strategy

[courtney via illumos-discuss]

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Hello all,

I am trying to think of a backup strategy for my SmartOS box's zone data. Right now I am doing znapzend to an attached external hard drive, but I want to change my bacukps to a dedicated backup computer. I'm still pretty new to illumos, so I am interested in other peoples ideas. Currently, I am thinking of propping up an extra computer with OmniOS to handle this job.

I have a couple thoughts right now. One is to either let each zone do backups with something like sanoid. I imagine that should work with joyent and lx branded zones. The other idea is I noticed OmniOS has a page on zrepl, and that it has pull functionality. I bet I could do pull backups to my zones and snapshot/sync the zoned datasets.

For the bhyve branded zones, I figure I will do what I do now with restic. What do you all think? The last thing I am wondering is how should I set up OmniOS? Should I let these backups happen in the global zone, or should I delegate a dataset to a non-global zone?

Courtney
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Re: [discuss] Backup strategy

[Sad Clouds]

On Mon, 2 Dec 2024 22:09:00 -0500
"courtney via illumos-discuss" <discuss@lists.illumos.org> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am trying to think of a backup strategy for my SmartOS box's zone data.

There is probably an infinite number of backup strategies. Personally I
prefer simple and unobtrusive solutions, e.g. dump/restore with
ufs/xfs, or send/receive with zfs, or even dd or tar.

It depends on the type of applications you have running in a zone. For
example, taking a zfs snapshot may not necessarily provide a consistent
backup for SQL databases or other data sitting in application's
buffers. I think the safest way is to shut down a zone, take a snapshot,
start a zone and then perform backup of the snapshot in your own time.

If you have a single appliance and take backup infrequently, then
attaching a USB disk to store backups is simple and effective. However,
if you have multiple appliances and want to run periodic backup
scripts, then a dedicated backup appliance may scale better. There are
free and commercial backup software/hardware which support multiple
protocols (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, etc) and can be used with different OSes.
The downside with such solutions is complexity and inevitable bugs in
some of the software, which may result in corrupt or unrecoverable
backups.

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