On Wed, 8 Aug 2012, Russell Coker wrote:
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/08/08/hard-drives-backup/
I've just written the above blog post about my future backup plans. This includes a server that has about 400G of data in the US that I have been backing up via rsync. If I transition that to ZFS then is there any way of starting a send/receive backup process that doesn't involve initially transferring 400G of data? My ADSL plan only allows 150G per month and I can't have a 3 month period of no good backups...
I don't know anything that could make a ZFS file system equivalent to the source one (so that snapshots work afterwards) if you rsync. There are of course the "obvious" candidates as compression. I don't know how much it helps. You could divide the original ZFS in various ones by balancing data and manipulating mountpoints. Then you could send them "piece by piece" over a few months while the rsync is still running. Afterwards you can run recursive snapshots from the root of it. Maybe you consider a "zfs send" to a local external disk and then a physical "send by mail". You can encrypt it on the local disk. I am afraid there isn't a good solution out there yet. Regards Peter