proper ZFS backups

[ripken204]

My two ZFS AIO builds have been going strong for a few months now.
I need to come up with a more automated backup process, it's pretty much manual right now.

I have one build at home and one at work.

My home server has 16TB usable space, about 8TB is used right now.
At home I have an extra server with 8x1.5TB hdds, currently they are in raid6, but I am not using them anymore so I can do whatever I want with it.
Should I install OpenIniana on this server and create a ZFS array? possibly use zfs send from my live server to this backup server? the issue is that I can't fit a full backup of my live server on the backup server, but I probably won't backup everything anyways.

At work the issue is a little different.
There is the live server which has about 4TB usable space, we then have a windows server which I would like to backup to. I have no idea how to go about doing that.

Should I not bother with ZFS send/receive? maybe use something like Bacula instead?

What are you guys doing to backup your ZFS servers?

 

[danswartz]

I backup manually once per month to an external 1TB drive. My data pool is 2TB, but only 1/3 full, so everything fits. I snapshot the data pool, send it to the esata drive, delete both snapshots. The dataset being backed up is an esxi nfs datastore, so I have compression set on the esata drive pool. I do daily rsync backups of several linux servers to other datasets, but those are not backed up.