Backups with Send / Recv

[mattlach]

Hey all,

So, Since Crashplan is exiting the consumer backup market, and I was in the process of upgrading my main NAS (replacing one at a time and growing) I took this as an opportunity to create my own backup server using my old drives and some spare server hardware I had kicking around.

I based my scripts and cronjobs loosely off of what this guy did, and have it up and running quite nicely now, snapshotting the datasets I want to back up daily and ZFS send/receiving them via SSH to my backup server.

A thought just struck me today though.

Most nights, my incremental snapshots only take a few minutes to send, but what if I one day create some really large files (disk image dump or something) resulting in an incremental snapshot that takes more than 24h to send via WAN? What happens then?

Will the ZFS command error out and say "can't receive, receive for this dataset already in progress" or will something funky happen?

Would it make sense to create some sort of "is the script already running" check as part of its execution?

I appreciate any suggestions.

 

[rs225]

zfs receive will fail because the prior snapshot doesn't (yet) exist. You can test that, and then see how it breaks your script.