Today I managed to do enough hacking that the my new HL-4 home lab box is useful. And it dawned on me that I should back this puppy up. So I did a little peeking under the hood to see what the root filesystem was, XFS.
That’s a new one on me. It’s not copy on write, doesn’t take snapshots, and can’t do replication. So how do I back it up? I guess there’s always some foolishness with RSYNC to the ZFS partition and snapshots there. SyncThing?
Are there any well known tools and methods in the community?
Hey DismalWizard,
For backing up XFS you can always use the xfsdump command which is designed for backing up XFS to a file or device. If you are running Rocky Linux it should be downloaded by default!
It is a pretty neat tool and should help you out!
If you had any specific questions I could help you out or you can always read the manual pages using
man xfsdump
I hope this helps!
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I’m going to try xfsdump using a file on the ZFS pool as the output. When the new TrueNAS box arrives, I’ll set that up to replicate to it as backup.
Note that all man page examples of xfsdump usage are for /dev/tape as if anything with moving parts were affordable!
I thought the OpenZFS licensing concerns had been resolved to permit kernel inclusion. Linus?
XFS is a good root filesystem choice but not snapshot and replication capable.