I currently have two computers, one that has a big zfs raidz pool that I currently back everything up to. Right now, on my local computer I use rsnapshot to do snapshot backups via rsync to the remote zfs pool. I know I’m wasting a ton of space because I have snapshotting in the rsync backup, and then the zfs pool is snapshotted every day.
Does it make sense to just do a regular rsync into a backup directory on the zfs pool and then just rely on the zfs pool snapshotting for snapshotting?
Maybe eventually I will put the local machine on zfs and then just send the local zfs snapshots over, but that will take some time. Thanks!
Zfs send / receive might be what you want
Wouldn’t send/receive also sync snapshots across ZFS instances?
Docs say this , so yeah. "send streams can either be “full”, containing all data in a given snapshot, or “incremental”, containing only the differences between two snapshots. ZFS receive reads these send streams and uses them to re-create identical snapshots on a receiving system. "
Hm, so send doesn’t “create the same state, bits and snapshots” on the other side. Instead it “adds net new snapshots” on the other side. 🤔
Perhaps I could use send instead of Syncthing after all. But then again I’m typically syncing net new data so the optimization would be minimal.
I believe there is a method to do a 1-1 build copy, but my expertise ends at this point