ZFS Automatic Snapshots and Replication

For ZFS.

  • simplesnap - a simple and powerful cron-based network snapshot transfer tool by John Goerzen.

    • Has a simple and secure wrapper so unfettered root access isn’t needed.
    • Designed to work with zfSnap or other snapshot-making tools on this page.
    • Supports multiple backup sources, targets, and target sets (such as offsite media rotation)
  • zfs-auto-snapshot - a simple cron-based service. Different names for different snapshots, with a simple count of how many to retain. Can exclude based on property.

  • snapxfer, a wrapper around:

    • zfSnap - a flexible snapshot-creation system. Can embed an expiry age in snapshot name, or override from command line.

    • zxfer - a flexible snapshot-transfer system. Can use rsync or zfs snapshots. Used together with another snapshotting system. For remote transfers, requires root ssh authorized_keys or sudo access.

  • zfs-snapshot-rotation-and-backup, a Python library and example scripts that use it. Expects ssh root access to remote.

  • zsnap – looks flexible and powerful, last commit 5 years ago. Requires Ruby.

  • Suggested on ZFS on Linux mailing list:

    • zetaback - feature-packed. Has a server-side agent to run on systems being backed up. Buggy config parser without sufficient validation on client.

    • zrep - for zfs based replication (possibly remote) of filesystems. Can also be used just for backups. License prohibits public redistribution. Does failover too. Doesn’t work on nested datasets. Designed to run once per minute. Same snapshot retention on both sides.

    • zfs-auto-snapshot - as above, for snapshotting

See Also

ZFS, ZFS on Linux


This is about running ZFS on Linux and Debian.