[OmniOS-discuss] Zones Backup

[Bob Friesenhahn]

My microserver project (Xeon D based) is almost completely done now. 
All services are partitioned into zones.  I created a base zone and 
then cloned that zone to create the other zones.  All 'data' used by 
a zone is external via lofs mounts with only configuration and 
services being in the zone.

While there is already backup of the 'data' using my existing methods 
(zfs send to live fs on another system + rsync from a different 
system), I have not yet come up with the best way to back up zones.

It is very easy to back up zones as long as one is willing to 
replicate all the data in the zone.  Plenty of documentation exists 
for how to do this.  Since OmniOS uses "big" zones, this results in 
excessive redundant data (e.g. OmniOS distribution files) being backed 
up.  Backing up unneeded files wastes space and makes restoration more 
complicated.

Effort to restore a whole system from scratch needs to be minimized.

using GNU diff I can do something like:

   diff -r -q /zones/base/root /zones/web/root

and see differences between my base zone and a 'web' zone.  Most 
differences are due to spurious differences in OmniOS itself.  If 
there was a manifest available for the whole installed system (perhaps 
possible to derive from IPS), then it could be used to determine the 
files to ignore, and the files changed or added outside of OmniOS. 
This could be used to drive a backup system which only emits added or 
changed files from the base.

Does anyone have an effective zone backup method they can share which 
strips out all the cruft and retains only key files such as 
configuration files?

Thanks,

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/