[indiana-discuss] Howto backup a rootpool on a Notebook?

[Cindy.Swearingen at Sun.COM]

Hi Bernd,

You can take a recursive root pool snapshot and send it to a pool on the 
second disk. If Time Slider is running, you could just send the root
pool related snapshots to the second disk.

I think the Time Slider team is working on a more robust approach, or
maybe some experts can share what they are currently doing.

We have some root pool recovery instructions, not specific to just
OpenSolaris releases, described here:

http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Troubleshooting_Guide#ZFS_Root_Pool_Recovery

Currently, ZFS does not support breaking a mirror and then using that
side of the mirror to recreate the pool. You could take the second disk 
(that you attached and detached) and import the root pool on another 
system (that includes the second disk). In any event, this RFE is 
already filed:

http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=5097228
provide 'zpool split' to create new pool by breaking all mirrors

Cindy

Bernd Schemmer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> now that I've successfully installed OpenSolaris 06.2009 on my notebook 
> I'm thinking about how to do a regular backup. Unfortunatley the 
> notebook has only one internal drive so that I can not use a mirror to 
> have data redundance.
> 
> So my current approach is:
> 
> Connect a second disk via USB ; attach the disk to the disk in the 
> rootpool ; wait until the resilvering of the root pool is done; and 
> detach the USB disk again.
> 
> That works but Solaris always resilvers the complete pool so that it 
> takes a long time (about 1 - 2 GB per minute; at this time 300 GB are in 
> use so that it takes  about 3 to 4 hours).
> 
> Is there a better method to create a backup of the root pool?
> 
> regards
> 
> Bernd
>