Arch Linux

Ibex

Member

Registered: 2006-03-02

Posts: 135

ZFS Snapshot Manager

Since a few months, I'm using ZFS everywhere. I find it a great filesystem which provides nice features like snapshotting, replication, data safety through zraid2 and more.

But as local snapshots are only useful to recover from a whoops-I-deleted-the-wrong-file scenarios and not from the my-disk-just-crashed scenarios, I started using replication (zfs send and zfs receive) to move snapshots to my NAS. I also build a smaller NAS for my parents to store all their holiday pictures and stuff like that including - again - replication to place it safe on my own NAS. My firewall/gateway didn't have ZFS and was rsyncing to my NAS on which I executed all snapshots.

However, managing all that became more and more a pain in the ass, since I was every evening taking manual snapshots and moving them around. That was why I started looking for an easy zfs snapshot tool that could provide me with some basic functionality and was easy to setup (configuration file and some cli commands).

After a dozen of iterations with a bunch of scripts, I started making a more "complete" approach by building a package, creating a service, a configuration file and so on. ZFS Snapshot Manager (zfs-snap-manager) was born.

Freatures:

• Snapshot at a given time, or when a so-called trigger-file is found (time based for pcs, servers, ... and trigger based for a device that doesn't support zfs but is rsyncing the data)

• Replicating the snapshots to another pool (local) or to another node (remote)

• Cleaning up snapshots (using a grandfather-father-son system, you can setup e.g. to keep 7 daily snapshots, 3 weekly, 11 monthly and 4 yearly snapshots)

• Quite easy setup.

You can find the package at https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/zfs-snap-manager/ and the code is on github at https://github.com/khenderick/zfs-snap-manager. It's licensed under MIT so you can do anything with it, but if you start using it, let me know as it's nice to know people like your software .

Also, all feedback is welcome, as I don't know whether all documentation is clear. Or - while I use it in production on 3 systems so it should be working quite well - maybe it contains some bugs which you can report through github.

I hope some of you can use it .