ZFS using ZFS to safeguard my data

Ah OK.

The reason I asked, an aquaintance of me did a setup for a redundant service box. Two machines who each could almost handle all mail/web/svn/whatever, but easily half of it. Each has a raid-1 with one disc of that in the other machine, so you would upon a hardware fault fire up a VM on the other which ran the missing services on the then degraded raid-1. That worked pretty good, at least I heard no bad things.
 
Crivens said:
The reason I asked, an aquaintance of me did a setup for a redundant service box. Two machines who each could almost handle all mail/web/svn/whatever, but easily half of it. Each has a raid-1 with one disc of that in the other machine, so you would upon a hardware fault fire up a VM on the other which ran the missing services on the then degraded raid-1. That worked pretty good, at least I heard no bad things.
Click to expand...
Very "interesting" setup. Creative :) Did s/he consider to use HAST & CARP & clustered service mirror setup?
 
Argentum said:
You can mitigate the human failure by zfs snapshot .... Agree that the snapshot does not replace backup, but still gives some extra security, especially on mirror or raid.
Click to expand...

100% agree, and there are recursive snapshots, so, you only make one initial full snapshot and then, with
the recursive snapshot only send the new/changed files/folder to the backup pool
 
So far, this approach is working fine, but I can tell that ZFS doesn't like me doing it this way because whenever I online a drive to sync it with the primary drive, it complains that it is in a degraded state and 1 drive is faulted since it is inaccessible. I think it will continue working with ZFS, but the failure point will most likely be human error. At some point, a year or 2 down the road, if I am not careful when reading the error messages, I could end up manually doing something disastrous. Additionally, I have to export the pool to be able to remove drives from it. I am not quite sure why, the first USB device I added to the mirror detached fine via zpool offline, but perhaps it confused it when I added another USB device to the mirror.
We will see.

I kept 2 drives to be used for syncing the snapshots so at least I will always have a copy(ies) to fallback to even if I change the process I'm using to backup.
 
So far, my "unique" backup strategy is working "okay". It is a little bit confusing as to what I'm doing, and if I import the pool from my drive that has yet to be synced, I might not see files that were recently added.

I must export the pool now as it seems it won't let me offline the USB drive for whatever reason. This isn't much of an issue, but if I import the pool again, I need to be sure I import it from the updated drive or I would be confused ...

My order of operations:

0. unlock volume
1. update media (photos / videos)
2. lock volume
3. snapshot volume
4. online USB drive (perform any requisite steps, geli attach ...)
5. let mirror resilver
6. offline drive - now I can only export the drive. If I look closely it isn't letting me offline for whatever reason.
 
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