Backing up ZFS dataset from within a jail

[ilium007]

I have spent a few hours trying to get this to work. I want to run my Duplicacy backups from within a jail so that I can install the duplicacy binary and modify periodic jobs from with within the jail.

Can I access the FreeNAS ZFS datasets from within the jail without affecting the FreeNAS shares?

I want to be able to run a zfs snapshot from within the jail, mount that snapshot, run the duplicacy backup and unmount and delete the zfs snapshot.

 

[garm]

Not directly. You can write a script that you run on FreeNAS with cron. Have the script take the snapshot and mount it for the jail, then iocage exec <jail> <command> to run the backup job from within the jail.

 

[ilium007]

Not directly. You can write a script that you run on FreeNAS with cron. Have the script take the snapshot and mount it for the jail, then iocage exec <jail> <command> to run the backup job from within the jail.

Can I mount storage to a running jail or will I need to stop/start the jail each time?

 

[garm]

I haven’t tried as I run my backups the other way, but I think you should be able to mount a folder to the jail and then mount the snapshot in that folder with the script. Messing with fstab for each backup job might be a source of issues

 

[ilium007]

I have found that I can mount and unmount storage into a jail successfully but I am now stuck in finding a way to complete these backups.

I am using Duplicacy from the command line. The basic steps are as follows:

• snapshot the ZFS dataset
• mount the snapshot
• run the duplicacy backup
• unmount snapshot
• prune local ZFS snapshots

Out of these steps, only 1 would run from the jail - running duplicacy backup. Given this, would it be advisable to run the backup from the Freenas O/S instead?

Duplicacy stores the chuck metadata locally so this would all be stored within the root home, this is the downside to doing to this way. If I could run the snapshot from *within* the jail I could keep it all contained.

 

[garm]

Snapshots and other ZFS actions need to be done from FreeNAS. Keep the script in a dedicated dataset but execute it from /root, you can perform actions in the jail with iocage exec <jailname> <command>

 

[ilium007]

Snapshots and other ZFS actions need to be done from FreeNAS. Keep the script in a dedicated dataset but execute it from /root, you can perform actions in the jail with iocage exec <jailname> <command>

What do you mean by 'execute it from /root? I know how to run jail commands from FreeNAS, that's not my problem. My issue is with limiting how much is done from FreeNAS vs the jail.

 

[garm]

I would say best practice is setting up cron to run backup from FreeNAS and have it trigger the job inside the jail.