I have installed Solaris 11 Express on my machine and now I am wondering what is the best way to backup (to another hard disc) and restore the system hard disc content.
The backup should to be done every night using a script launched by cron and all previously done backups should be available to be restored (not just one backup which would be overwritten the next night). The restore procedure should be as simple and fast as possible.
Relying on zfs snapshots in the process of backuping is appreciated.
You have answered on your own question with another question?
ZFS snapshots are good for file system backups as they easier than other ways.
But if you want to backup the whole system Flash Archive flar is also good.
Anyways if you want to know the howto to backup your ZFS file systems just post your system disk layout to aid forum members to give you an accurate answer.
I have in fact experimented with this for a while already and created a shell script for automatic backuping of snapshots. I was however not able to restore the backups correctly - more specifically, I did not succeed in making the computer boot from the restored disc.
I did even create a topic about that on this forum earlier. I described the steps I took to restore the snapshots and what the results were.
I have experimented yet a little more since then but still did not succeed and I have no idea what to try anymore.
Besides the steps that I described in the other topic I did also try to install the system to a new disc in a standard way and restore just the important filesystems (the system root and the user directories) but that did not work either.
That's why I thought the way I've chosen might be completely wrong and that I should create a more general question in order to find out the ways other people do that.
On my system hard disc I have the following filesystems:
rpool[*]rpool/ROOT[]rpool/ROOT/solaris (this is the system root directory)[]rpool/export (this is the root of user home directories)
I tried multiple times restoring according to the ZFS Troubleshooting Guide - Siwiki (and experimented with it as well), but there must be something I'm missing, because I have never been able to successfully boot from the recovered disc.
I was searching around myself and found Storix bare-metal recovery. I just downloaded it so I don't know how well it works, but it reports to do exactly what I need. Checking out the Linux version as well. I'll post what I find out.