With my main ZFS machine completed, time is now to setup a remote backup. Unlike main server with two disks and an additional SSD, this one will have just a lonely 2 TB disk inside. Main desire is to have a cheap backup machine that we'll hopefully never use for recovery.
OS of a choice is NAS4Free and I decided to install it directly on HD without a swap partition. Installing on a data drive is a bit controversial but it does simplify setup quite a bit if you move drive from machine to machine. And the swap partition is pretty much unnecessary if you have more than 2 GB of RAM. Remember, we are just going to sync to this machine - nothing else.
After NAS4Free got installed (option 4: Install embedded OS without swap), disk will contain a single boot partition with the rest of space flopping in the breeze. What we want is to add a simple partition on the 4K boundary for our data:
# gpart add -t freebsd -b 1655136 -a 4k ada0
ada0s2 addedPartition start location was selected to be the first one on a 4KB boundary after the 800 MB boot partition. We cannot rely on gpart as it would select the next available location and that would destroy performance on a 4K drives (pretty much any spinning drive these days). And we cannot use freebsd-zfs for partition type since we are playing with MBR partitions and not GPT.
To make disk easier to reach, we label that partition:
# glabel label -v disk0 ada0s2And we of course encrypt it:
# geli init -e AES-XTS -l 128 -s 4096 /dev/label/disk0
# geli attach /dev/label/disk0Last step is to actually create our backup pool:
# zpool create -O readonly=on -O canmount=off -O compression=on -O atime=off -O utf8only=on -O normalization=formD -O casesensitivity=sensitive -O recordsize=32K -m none Backup-Data label/disk0.eliTo backup data we can then use zfs sync for initial sync:
# DATASET="Data/Install"
# zfs snapshot ${DATASET}@$Backup_Next
# zfs send -p $DATASET@$Backup_Next | ssh $REMOTE_HOST zfs receive -du Backup-Data
# zfs rename $DATASET@$Backup_Next Backup_PrevAnd similar one for incremental from then on:
# DATASET="Data/Install"
# zfs snapshot ${DATASET}@$Backup_Next
# zfs send -p -i $DATASET@$Backup_Prev $DATASET@$Backup_Next | ssh $REMOTE_HOST zfs receive -du Backup-Data
# zfs rename $DATASET@$Backup_Next Backup_PrevThere is a lot more details to think about so I will share script I am using - adjust at will.
Other ZFS posts in this series:
[2018-07-22: NAS4Free has been renamed to XigmaNAS as of July 2018]