[rescue] Oracle making just a little harder to keep old machines in use

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:01:24PM -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> What do you need from a zfsdump that zfs send won't do?

Among other things, the ability to restore files on a system with
a different architecture and a different operating system.  While
there have been sporadic portability issues with dump/ufsdump over
the years, I've had pretty good luck doing this across various 'nix
systems in the past decade.

And perhaps this is just my lack of zfs savvy speaking, but it's
not clear to me yet how to do incremental backups using this method.
One of the systems that I run has ~40T of storage mostly consisting
of large files that are very infrequently modified (in some cases:
never) and I'd like to leverage that into making backups run as
quickly as possible and occupy as little space as possible.

I've just picked up a book on ZFS in order to address my lack of $clue
on this and maybe when I'm done reading it this won't be such a concern
for my present needs.  However, I do think that it'd be a good thing
for there to exist a unified, portable dump work-a-like across all 'nix.

---Rsk