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Can I create ZFS snapshots on another pool?

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Dave

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May 10, 2008, 1:22:23 PM5/10/08
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I've got a Sun Blade 2000 with Solaris 10 update 5. It has a pair of
internal 137 GB SCSI disks (FC-AL) which are not mirrored and a pair of
1 TB USB external drives which are mirrored to create a single 1 TB
volume (actually 914 GB, but that is marketing for you).

Is it possible to create snapshots of the SCSI disks (which I intend
using for most tasks) and putting the snapshots onto the
cheaper/slower/larger USB drives?


The SCSI disks are close to full capacity, so I am not going to get many
snapshots on them, whereas I have tons of space on the pool made from
the external USB disks.

Tim Bradshaw

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May 10, 2008, 1:34:30 PM5/10/08
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On May 10, 6:22 pm, Dave <f...@coo.com> wrote:

> Is it possible to create snapshots of the SCSI disks (which I intend
> using for most tasks) and putting the snapshots onto the
> cheaper/slower/larger USB drives?

No. But you could make a snapshot on one pool, then use zfs send/
receive to send it to the other one. Or you could put all the disks
in one pool.

usenetper...@gmail.com

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May 10, 2008, 1:58:39 PM5/10/08
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On May 10, 10:22 am, Dave <f...@coo.com> wrote:
> I've got a Sun Blade 2000 with Solaris 10 update 5. It has a pair of
> internal 137 GB SCSI ... trimmed

> Is it possible to create snapshots of the SCSI disks (which I intend
> using for most tasks) and putting the snapshots onto the
> cheaper/slower/larger USB drives?
Probably

> The SCSI disks are close to full capacity, so I am not going to get many
> snapshots on them, whereas I have tons of space on the pool made from
> the external USB disks.
man fssnap - it can be combined with a ufsdump/ufsrestore pipe.
It creates its own sparse file but its not as big as it looks : >

The caveats that Andrew mentioned are something to consider perhaps.
Depends on sparse files and exotic permission bits etc but I suspect
these wont be issues transferring "ordinary" files..? Certainly wont
hurt to try.

Dave

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May 10, 2008, 2:01:14 PM5/10/08
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Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> On May 10, 6:22 pm, Dave <f...@coo.com> wrote:
>
>> Is it possible to create snapshots of the SCSI disks (which I intend
>> using for most tasks) and putting the snapshots onto the
>> cheaper/slower/larger USB drives?
>
> No. But you could make a snapshot on one pool, then use zfs send/
> receive to send it to the other one.

OK, I will look at that.

> Or you could put all the disks
> in one pool.


But it is sensible (or possible) to put mirrored disks on the same pool
as un-mirrored ones? These disks have very different characteristics so
I doubt having them in one pool is a good idea. But I've only recently
starting looking at ZFS, so I dont claim to know much about it.

Tim Bradshaw

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May 11, 2008, 10:09:44 AM5/11/08
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On May 10, 7:01 pm, Dave <f...@coo.com> wrote:

> But it is sensible (or possible) to put mirrored disks on the same pool
> as un-mirrored ones? These disks have very different characteristics so
> I doubt having them in one pool is a good idea. But I've only recently
> starting looking at ZFS, so I dont claim to know much about it.

I hadn't read your description carefully enough. My guess is: no it's
never sensible to have a pool which is partly mirrored, and it is
probably not sensible to have pools made up of disks with wildly
differing performance characteristics.

(I guess it never occurred to me that you'd be using a pool which had
no redundancy :-))

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