number 9

I’ve got more zones than I know what to do with now, but they’re all interdependant.

I need to snapshot them all at the same time if I want to be able to rollback consistently.

Since it’s a backup it needs as few moving parts as possible.

I’m really more of a perl guy

As you saw yesterday, my shell scripting is pretty bloody awful.
But here’s a dead easy way to get daily snapshots across an entire storage pool.

   vera bin # cat /opt/local/bin/citizensnaps
   #! /bin/sh

   ZPOOL=$1

   if [ ! -n "$ZPOOL" ] ; then
           echo 'Usage: $0 poolname' ; exit
   fi

   # check we have a pool with that name
   /usr/sbin/zpool status $1 > /dev/null || exit

   TODAY=`date +%A`

   # get rid of last weeks snapshot, and create a fresh one
   pfexec zfs destroy -r ${ZPOOL}@${TODAY}
   pfexec zfs snapshot -r ${ZPOOL}@${TODAY}

Then run it out of roots crontab (or someone else with the correct rights profile) every night:

    # daily snapshot of everything
    59 23 * * * /opt/local/bin/citizensnaps tank

Bear in mind this is a dirt-simple, ‘works for me’ solution. If you want something more polished, look at Tim Fosters excellent work  (which is making its way into Opensolaris ).