Tux Machines

Backing up FreeBSD with Bacula via ZFS snapshot

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 25, 2023,

updated Dec 25, 2023

Tonight, while watching an episode of The Great British Bake Off, I configured a new Bacula backup jobs to cover some datasets which were not already backed up. I already have a backup jobs to backup all the jails, but only for datasets which sit right under zroot/jails (for example). This new solution takes a list of datasets, snapshots them, backs them up, then destroys those snapshots.

Why backup a snapshot? Consistency. During a backup of a live filesystem, changes occur. In a snapshot, no changes can occur; it represents a specific instance in time.

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Also in BSD spheres:

Lazy Reading for 2023/12/24

Merry almost Christmas! Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk story anthology Mirrorshades, available to read.  (via) An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities.  The birth of fuzzing.  (PDF, via via) Copyright law is living in the past.  A good explanation of music copyright monopoly oddities. ARCC opens for login tomorrow.