What is the right way to make a copy of a ZFS pool?

[RosePeach]

Hi,

I have a ZFS pool that is made up of 4 hard drives, together they can hold 750 Gigabytes. I have a 5th 1TB hard drive in my computer. I would like to backup the potentially 750 GB worth of data onto the 5th drive. Doing some research I've seen people suggest using an Rsync task but that requires 2 separate computers. I have seen people suggest a replication task but it seems like that also requires me to replicate the drives to another system. What is the best way to automate this backup task?

Thank you,
Rose Peach

 

[Apollo]

Replication is the better way to go.
Both volumes can be on the same system or on different systems.
I have never been able to reliably run Rsync and have 100% content transfered. Most of the time it is file and folder length issue or non English characters.

 

[blueether]

I would go with ZFS Replication aswell after doing a snapshot.

 

[danb35]

I have seen people suggest a replication task but it seems like that also requires me to replicate the drives to another system.

That is the assumption of the GUI, but (1) you can do replication from the CLI (which is often a good thing for a one-time job), and (2) you can set the "remote host" to "localhost" in the GUI and run a scheduled replication task that way. It's much more complicated than it ought to be, and I think I remember hearing that this will change with 11.3, but it's still possible in 11.2 and previous versions.

 

[blueether]

It's much more complicated than it ought to be, and I think I remember hearing that this will change with 11.3

Yep much better in 11.3:

I also see that you can change the lifetime. so you could do a 2 week retention on source and then keep for a month on the dest/backup server

 

[seanm]

You can also read about 'zfs send' to learn about the internals.