Pete Finds a Job
This article makes me want to be home with a shiny new OpenSolaris disc in hand.
So, the idea here is quite simple, in the scheme of things:
You have pete.home.local, who is happily running OpenSolaris. Pete has a ZFS volume that’s actually just loop-mounted to a file within the system (maybe best described as a “fake hard drive within a hard drive”).
I back up data to this 200GB “fake” file system, which is then snapshotted periodically (a feature of ZFS) to create waypoints within the data. Then, these snapshots are “sent” to a USB hard disk for back-up-back-up storage whenever necessary.
The test case for this will be a blast. Basically, I will simulate a horde of rabid apes coming in and writing zeroes to that entire hard drive (simulating a “crash” and “replacement” of the drive). Then, I will reinstall OpenSolaris and load up the simulated “last good snapshot” from the USB drive.
If this works, I will dance a jig and be happy to finally have a coherent backup model for all these computers.
The icing on the cake is that future snapshot saves to the USB drive are incremental, meaning that any snapshots beyond the first are only the deltas over time.