[Discuss] Backing up the entire filesystem

[richard.pieri at gmail.com (Rich Pieri)]

On Fri, 26 Oct 2018 12:32:26 -0400
Marco Milano <marco.milano at gmx.com> wrote:

> How did you get the root filesystem under ZFS?
> 
> Is there a nice/clean/easy recipe ?

Debian does not include ZFS so not "clean". You have to do a normal
install (on XFS), install the ZFS on Linux packages, build your zpool,
copy XFS to ZFS, update the initrd to include SPL and ZFS kernel
modules, set the zpool's mount point to /, and test.

It's easier with Ubuntu since ZFSoL is included but still not clean
because Ubuntu's installers don't know about ZFS so you still have to
hack it by hand.

To be honest I don't think it's worth the effort. ext2 for /boot (if
you have it) and XFS for / is fine for the OS since these in principle
don't need routine backups. Run etckeeper to put /etc under automatic
revision control, and rsync to durable storage as needed.

-- 
Rich Pieri