Long time RSYNC User - Thinking of switching to Replication - Advice requested

TrueNAS General
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Hello,

First time poster (on these new forums), long time lurker!

Anyway, for years, I have run a “production” pool and a “backup” pool on the same machine. I do not have a remote system but all of my personal stuff that is irreplaceable goes to a cloud service too. These pools have been different layouts historically and I have leveraged RSYNC and snapshots to keep a history of backups. This has worked very well in the past.

Recently, I have changed my system to have the prod and backup pools be exactly the same. During this process, I used replication to populate my new prod pool and it was slick as snot on a doorknob. This got me to thinking - should I use replication for backups? I am just a little confused as to how the snapshots work and weather or not I could still take a snapshot of the backup pool right before backups occur - to protect against a whoopsie.

I am sure there are ways to do so - but is the “juice worth the squeeze” to invest the time into this? RSYNC has been bomb-proof and all my scripts work well enough. Reporting is not perfect but it has not failed me yet.

Anyway - anyone else have experience with this? Looking for some sage guidance.

Cheers,

2

Ew. :nauseated_face: What are you, some kind of pig?

A ZFS incremental replication is exponentially faster than incremental rsync runs. There’s no need to populate a massive directory/file listing on both ends prior to running.

Replications also guarantee the same exact filesystem, down to the very blocks, permissions, and snapshots.

However, the main caveat is if you prune heavily on either side, and accidentally lose a “common” base snapshot. You’ll have to start all over again from a full replication.

You cannot. Once you commit to a source → destination replication process, it’s only one-way, and must remain so. Any and all changes to the destination must come from the source.

See these examples.