Backup solution

[Njanja]

Hey all,
I have three truenas and want them to back up between each other.
What is the best solution? Should I run rsync or replication tasks?

 

[NugentS]

Replication - its a much better idea

 

[jgreco]

It depends. Replication works within the ZFS innards to quickly and securely replicate ZFS contents, but for backups, this may or may not be what you want.

For example, if you have a ZFS filer which holds hourly snapshots for a few weeks, but a backup filer where you want to hold weekly snapshots for ten years, you might find rsync more suitable.

rsync is not married to the internals of ZFS, so a ZFS fault on your frontline filer is not likely to somehow end up replicated to the backend. However, then you have three asynchronous processes, the frontend snapshot, the rsync process, and the backend snapshot. This means that data from the frontend could be in the process of being rsync'ed to the backend, which takes a snapshot mid-transfer, so you get an incomplete file as part of the backend snapshot. By way of comparison, a ZFS snapshot replicated from front to back is going to wind up the same on the back as it is on the front. Both strategies can be useful depending on what you need.

 

[Njanja]

Hello,

This option should be good for me. If one does not work, then I have backup on the other two.