[H-GEN] Opensolaris ZFS backup options

[Patrick Nichols]

Hello All,

I've recently been playing with opensolaris.  I've mastered most of the 
problems I've had with it and now I'm using it as my primary fileserver 
and vm server.  I'm down to one task on my list and I'm not sure of the 
best solution.

My problem is simply reliable unattended backups.  I want to produce 
bootable USB drive clones of my mirrored root pool (rpool).  I'm 
currently doing this with "zpool attach ...", "zpool offline ..." and 
"zpool detach".  This takes user input to determine the drive (which 
could probably be scripted) and I don't want this.  The main problem is 
that system performance drops while the usb drive is attached to the rpool.

What I had working when I was using linux in this machine's place was 
plugging in a usb drive.  Then at a pre-determined time (7am Wed for 
instance) it would check which drives were connected (/dev/dsk/by-uuid) 
and perform a backup to the external drive, unmount it and produce an 
emailed report. I could remove the drive at any time and I'd have a 
consistent backup from 7am Wednesday morning.  It also worked with more 
than one drive attached and would backup to all attached usb drives that 
matched my scripts requirements.

What is the best way to do the same thing with my shiny new opensolaris 
host and zfs filesystems?  I'm guessing zfs send/receive, but I don't 
know how to produce a copy with the same name, or arrange for the system 
to boot off a different root pool name.

Thanks,
Patrick.

-- 
Patrick Nichols