Ubiquitous Talk

As a follow on to my blog entry Provisioning Disaster Recovery with ZFS, iSCSI and VMware I created this snapshot rollup script to help maintain the growing snapshots and minimize disk consumption. The script is an add-on to the zfsadm account cron jobs and runs under the security privileges of the zfsadm user detailed in that blog. An input text file is used to specify what ZFS path’s will be rolled up to a Grandfather Father Son backup scheme. All out of scope snapshots are destroyed leaving the current day’s and week’s snapshots, Friday weekly snapshots of the current month, each month’s end and as well, in time the year end snapshots. The cron job needs to run at minimum on target host but it would be prudent to run it on both systems. The script is aware of the possiblity that a snapshot may be cloned and will detect and log it. To add the job is simply a matter of adding it to the zfsadm users crontab.

# crontab –e zfsadm

0 3 * * * ./zfsgfsrollup.sh zfsrollup.lst

Hint: crontab uses vi – http://www.kcomputing.com/kcvi.pdf  “vi cheat sheet”

The key sequence would be hit “i” and key in the line then hit “esc :wq” and to abort “esc :q!”

The job detailed here will run once a day at 3:00 AM which may need to be extended if you have a very slow link between the servers. If you intend to use this script as shown you should follow the additional details for adding a cronjob found in the original blog, items like time zone and the likes of are discussed there.

As well the script expects the gnu based versions of date and expr.

Here are the two files that are required

zfsgfsrollup.sh

zfsrollup.lst

Hopefully you will find it to be useful.

Regards,

Mike