FreeBSD UFS/ZFS Snapshot Management Environment
November 11th, 2007 by Ralf S. EngelschallBased on various feedback I’ve now improved my FreeBSD Snapshot Management Environment. The new version 20071111.2 is now available. In the past this was an abstraction layer for UFS snapshots only. Now it is an abstraction layer for both UFS and ZFS snapshot management and this way allows one to deal with snapshots during daily work independent whether one works on UFS or ZFS.To recap, this abstraction layer mainly provides three aspects:
- common snapshot management frontend snapshot(8) for creating, destroying, listing, mounting, unmounting and temporarily visiting snapshots manually.
- optional, automatic, periodic and flexible backup snapshot creation via periodic-snapshot(8) and a /etc/periodic.conf configuration, modeled after the NetApp Data ONTAP “snap sched” syntax.
- optional, abstracted and easy access to backup snapshot data via amd(8) and the /snap hierarchy (not a big deal for ZFS but important for convenient access to UFS snapshots).
The full functionality requires FreeBSD 7 or 8, of course. But FreeBSD 5 and 6 or also supported through the reduced UFS-only functionality. For more details please visit the webpage about my FreeBSD snapshot management environment.
![Ralf S. Engelschall's Train of Thoughts [.org]](http://trainofthoughts.org/blog/wp-content/themes/tot/tot-img/tot-2-CUT-typo-T.png)
November 13th, 2007 at 15:20 |
Do you have plans to merge this into the FreeBSD core system or at least announce it on any of the FreeBSD mailing lists to raise some awareness?
November 13th, 2007 at 18:59 |
I’ve currently actually no plans for integration for two reasons: 1. I’m completely busy and again fully directed to other topics and 2. I’m not sure whether shell scripts fit the core system well enough so others support such a integration. But I’ve announced the stuff to freebsd-hackers@ already, of course.