Problem with ZFS

[thePoet]

I recently migrated my usage of the ZFS filesystem on OS X from the Zevo implementation to OpenZFS. With Zevo, Retrospect didn't properly recognize the ZFS partition, but it would still back up the contents. With OpenZFS, Retrospect reports the ZFS partition as SMBFS and states that it is offline. Has anyone worked with using Retrospect to backup ZFS partitions or have any ideas to convince Retrospect to process the the data that was mounted from this partition?

[Mayoff]

Retrospect has never been tested with ZFS and it really is not a supported file system at this time.

[thePoet]

Does Retrospect intentionally ignoring filesystems it doesn't recognize, or is it looking for some aspect of the mount point and getting confused? When I ran Zevo, it backed up fine. I'm wondering what Zevo might have been doing differently to allow Retrospect to read the drive.

[gmassenburg]

Does Retrospect intentionally ignoring filesystems it doesn't recognize, or is it looking for some aspect of the mount point and getting confused? When I ran Zevo, it backed up fine. I'm wondering what Zevo might have been doing differently to allow Retrospect to read the drive.

 

dear Robin or other support folks,

 

as long-time Retrospect users, we've have long managed our smaller deep archives successfully with Retrospect to various LTO, originally LTO4, and now LTO6

 

i'm hoping to get some indication of whether Retrospect will be putting OpenZFS on your hit-list.  it's ideal for our planned near-line application.  we've just tested 1.2.7 and it's definitely past early alphas, although it's not been fully vetted yet.

 

our challenge is this:  as a very-large archive media producer–our large single-archives run to 8TB for a full opera production.  our media server is Solaris 11.1 running on a Supermicro system with planned expansion to 48 drives, for at least a 100TB capability if not more.  moving data reliably and quickly by any means other than a fast network (which we don't have yet, still stuck with 1gb ethernet) is not possible at the moment.  there's no Retrospect for Solaris (although i suppose that's a question as well).  so our online, near-line and archive methodologies are out of sync, and we're currently sneaker-netting a drive at a time.

 

it would be great to arrange storage in 8-drive ZFS raidz2 volumes.

 

any thoughts?

George Massenburg

Schulich School of Music at McGill University

Montreal, Quebec

[wp1]

With OpenZFS, Retrospect reports the ZFS partition as SMBFS and states that it is offline

I am encountering a related issue - I'm trying to use a ZFS disk to hold a media set, rather than to back up the ZFS volume.  ZFS seems like a perfect destination file system for a Retrospect media set.  But Retrospect 11 won't see the volume at all.  If I try to create it there by explicitly specifying a path, I just get back "An error has occurred".  Running OS X 10.9.4 and OpenZFS 1.30.

[Mayoff]

ZFS is untested and unsupported with Retrospect.

[gmassenburg]

ZFS is untested and unsupported with Retrospect.

 

dear all zfs users.

 

although zfs is unsupported by Retrospect, i've found a way to successfully back up volumes by alternate means.

 

so, one first sets a new mountpoint, say /mnt, which is then set to be Shared in System Prefs/Sharing  (i use SMB), but AFS should work as well

 

after <zpool import ZpoolNew> (or whatever the name of your zpool is), run <zfs set mountpoint=/mnt ZpoolNew>

 

bringing up Retrospect, one can now see /mnt if you browse your boot drive, and one may backup and copy from it.

 

George