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

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Sunday 09 May 2010, Stiphane Tsacas wrote:
> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 17:05, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-
refuge.org>wrote:
> > On Saturday 08 May 2010, Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> > > 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?
> >
> > ...
> >
> > > 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.
> >
> > Why won't (GNU) tar work?  It does everything that you say you are
> > wanting.
> >
> > Pat
>
> tar main drawback is that it may modify the directories/files access
>  time, while *dump will open the disk raw device, and read blocks
>  from there.

Is access time really that important?

With ZFS, can you mount a filesystem snapshot and use tar on that?
That's what we do with ext3 and Linux LVM at work where we care (plus
many more places it doesn't make any difference, but we do it anyways).

Pat
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