Just wondering what the best way to back up snapshots to another driver is?
That's the
zfs send/receive command. Sure you can rely on 3rd party tools but I'd seriously recommend against that. Because ask yourself this: in case of an emergency it's not uncommon to fire up a FreeBSD rescue environment to fix the problems. You'll have access to the base commands such as
zfs and
zpool but what about your 3rd party tool?
The best option is to make snapshots (
# zfs snapshot) and then send those to a remote storage (using
zfs send). See also the
zfs(8) manualpage.
ie: I have a 1tb zpool and 120gig pool for backups. Is it possible to just store the snapshots to the backup pool
Sure, using the option I mentioned above. You could consider storing the snapshots in file format (this will be easier on your storage space) but you could also opt to simply copy / install the entire filesystem which can make restoration and accessibility easier.
all the drives are on the same machine.
That's not much of a backup then, what if the machine itself goes bonkers?
Seriously, this sounds like a problematic scenario to me. First: why even bother? If you make regular snapshots and your pools are set up in a redundant way (RAID) then that will have the exact same effect. Sending the data to another pool on the same machine isn't very useful. Also because you can access those snapshots at any given time and use that to restore data if needed (you don't even have to rollback the snapshot because you can access the individual files, see the hidden
.zfs directory in the root of every ZFS filesystem).
However... also not totally unuseful I suppose because if something were to happen with the first pool (data corruption?) then you'd probably still have your data.
However, that is of course assuming that the cause of the corruption didn't also spread to your other drives / pools.
Generally speaking: making backups on the same machine isn't much of a backup.
