Creating a cold standby with zfs replication

hbauer

hbauer

I have a small server for some home automation and admin stuff which are running in different iocage jails.

I now would like to create a cold standby device that I will boot once a week with a usb stick. Then it should replicate the entire zfs disk from my online system to the disk so that if I boot the backup system it will directly boot into that last replicates state.
I know that I will have to to additional backup of data between the weekly updates but this would eliminate major reinstallation work when something bad is happening. The device we are talking about is an old low powered netstation without a second hard drive that I could use in a zfs mirror.

Any body out there that has already done something like this and can share some real live experience? (Please no answer that this is a stupid idea or plain links to the freebsd man page)

Any experience with some sort of cold standby would be appreciated
Regards
Hagen
 
If you want a utility that offers a little bit of simplicity, zap, works well for me. I set properties on my ZFS datasets such as time to live for the snapshot and backup host, then read that back in and run zap to create a snapshot and send it to the destination nightly via cron.

I see that you want to minimize major reinstallation work. This is what I use:
github.com

GitHub - walterjwhite/freebsd-installer

Contribute to walterjwhite/freebsd-installer development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

I download a USB image, install it to a USB stick, then install that on top of it. Then, I point it at a git repository with my system configuration. If you're seriously interested, I could update the example repository here with more examples:

github.com

GitHub - walterjwhite/freebsd-example

Contribute to walterjwhite/freebsd-example development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com github.com

I just created 3 new disks using this process as my old drive was failing. It works for me, perhaps I could modify it to make it useful for you.
 
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