[kwlug-disc] FYI, zbackup

[bob+kwlug at softscape.ca]

Hello folks.

I was speaking with Chris after his talk on BTRFS and we got to talking
about a strategy to back up BTRFS file systems to a public cloud provider
efficiently while maintaining the privacy of your data.

To that end I thought that zbackup (http://zbackup.org) might fit the bill.
He asked me to post that to the list for general discussion and perhaps as a
reminder to himself about it.

The tool itself works something like this:

tar c somestuff | zbackup backup --non-encrypted REPO/backups/somestuff.tar

where the "REPO/" directory is something initialized by zbackup and contains
the compressed blocks and deduplication meta-info.

Accordingly, to recover things you would do this:

zbackup restore REPO/backupssomstuff.tar | tar xv

Since it just takes a stream of bytes on stdin and "dehydrates" them and is
able to rehydrate them into the same stream of bytes, you can pipe anything
you want to into it (eg: zfs send!)

Also, if memory serves, you can use some pretty strong crypto on the
repository itself. I was thinking that keeping a local, encrypted REPO
directory that you would rsync up to the cloud would be a decent solution
georedundant backup solution.

I have used this recently to take 2.5TB of uncompressed daily database dumps
and shrink them down to 7.8G. Admittedly, this data lends itself to a high
deduplication ratio, but the prospects are intriguing for zfs/btrfs send
bundles.

Anyway, check it out if you get a chance and let the list know your
experiences with the tool.

Thanks,
Bob.