[NCLUG] zfs (my hard drive crashed, time to upgrade the fs?)

John Gilmore j.arthur.gilmore at gmail.com
Sat Jan 4 15:27:30 MST 2014


Darn fumbled return button... ignore the last 2 paragraphs there, they
were a rough draft.. I was working on that list.. Yes, poor form to
reply to myself, but what's a man to do?


So my tentative plan:
 Upgrade to wheezy (DONE)
 Install debian-zfs (DONE)
 buy new hard drive (OOPS! Got a 1TB drive instead)
 create new zpool
    w/ new HD, and two (2) 2TB sparse files
    remove sparse files
  copy / to new zfs file system.
 reboot to new root
 reformat old ext3 / with zfs, replacing one of the 2TB spare files.
 purchase new 2TB hard drive, format with LUKS, add to zpool in place
of 2nd sparse file

I haven't looked up the specific commands for that, but so far so good
right? I can get that far with recipes that I can find on the web
fairly easily, I think.

Now on to the tough stuff.

I'd like automatic snapshots instead of the rsync dance I was doing
before. How do I set that up? I'll still need rsync for the remote
comptuers certainly, but I think that zfs is a much more reliable and
finer-grained solution for local (server) snapshots

I'd like precious files (/var/local/pics, /home/*/docs, a few others)
to have two copies on each spindle. How can I assure that?

On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 3:19 PM, John Gilmore <j.arthur.gilmore at gmail.com> wrote:
> Due to a hard drive failure, I'm planning on upgrading to encrypted
> ZFS. I was running Debian Squeeze, which doesn't support zfs, so I
> upgraded to Wheezy. Which I know is a bad idea with one drive already
> dead, I should have liked to have waited till after I had functional
> backups again, but didn't see a way to upgrade to ZFS w/o first
> upgrading to wheezy.
>
> The setup I had:
>
> hda seagate 2Tb
>   500mb /boot (ext3)
>   remainder LUKS / (ext3)
> hdb Western Digital 2Tb (predictably, this is the one that failed,
> though it's newer)
>   LUKS /var/backups (ext3)
>
> So my tentative plan:
>  Upgrade to wheezy (DONE)
>  Install debian-zfs (DONE)
>  buy new hard drive (OOPS! Got a 1TB drive instead)
>  create new zpool w/ new HD and false 2TB sparse file
>
>
> One of my two 2Tb hard drives failed its SMART tests this last
> weekend. Fortuneately, it was the backup hard drive, and the only
> thing on it is snapshots (made w/ rsync via yarbu) of the first hard
> drive (and the other computers on my LAN as well)
>
> So I bought a new hard drive, but I or


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