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USB with ZFS

L

ldoodle

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 29, 2011
Messages
172
Hiya,

Is it possible to provision a single USB drive to ZFS without making it a vdev. I want to use USB for critical backup (mainly photos and home videos, everything else can be re-ripped) and would want it to be 'portable' between ZFS and Windows, so if my ZFS box completely dies I can plug the drive into a Windows box and access the data.

If you can do this, can you still use zfs send | receive to actually copy the data from zfs to usb.

Thanks
 
You could probably do that if you accessed the drives via a VM in windows and then shared the drives back out over samba to the windows via the VM host.

It would be clunky though - and for a data backup I think having something a little more straightforward would be better.

If it's small enough to fit on USB drives a cloud backup maybe? LIke crashplan?

If you want ZFS support (For the data protection) you can pickup a small atom/zacate setup with a hard drive for under 300 probably and store to that on the network.
 
There's an apples and oranges thing here. ZFS is not a system, it's a filesystem. It runs on a host OS like FreeBSD or OpenSolaris. I'd be willing to bet either OS has the capability to mount an NTFS filesystem. Sure you lose the benefit of checksumming, but you are already storing your data on a non-duplexed disk, so that is not such a big deal. A little google-fu shows you can apparently mount ntfs on opensolaris. You would not use zfs send to put the data there, just vanilla cp. What is the host zfs OS?
 
Mounting NTFS on OpenSolaris / Solaris 11 Express sucks big time. ntfs-3g driver gives me 3MB/sec. I have instead, installed Windows7 in VirtualBox and given the NTFS partition as a raw disk to the Win7 virtual machine. Then I get 18MB/sec. WinXP in VirtualBox gives me 10MB/sec

Thus, it is not easy to mount ntfs in Solaris. The best would be to access the disk via the network.
 
Wow, it must be using fuse :) 10-20MB/sec still blows though. An alternative: use ZFS on the USB disk. If it dies and you need to pull data off of it, boot your windows box using an opensolaris live-cd, mount the USB disk, and copy the data elsewhere?
 
USB drive : are we talking 3TB hard drive, or 8GB thumb drive ?

Isn't FAT/exFAT an option ?
 
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