Letsgetdugg

This is a followup on my previous post concerning how to correctly snapshot databases on ZFS. Snapshotting MySQL any other way will just lead to corrupt database states, essentially making your backups useless. Here is my script that I use to snapshot our MySQL database. It uses my zBackup.rb script for the automated backup rotation. […]

I have a very non-standard storage setup at home. The setup is made up of a 3x500G raidz array on ZFS hosted by OSX. For the longest time I could not get files to copy over samba on ZFS. The files would stream just fine but not copy over, they would abort at the 99% […]

CouchDB was made for next generation filesystems such as ZFS and BTRFS. First off, unlike PostgreSQL or MySQL, CouchDB can be snapshot while in production without any flushing or locking trickery since it uses an append only B-Tree storage approach. That alone makes it a compelling database choice on ZFS/BTRFS. Second, CouchDB works hand-in-hand with […]

I recently had a WD Raptor drive die in a server that hosted our PostgreSQL database. I had a ZFS snapshot strategy setup that sent over ZFS snapshots of the live database to a ZFS mirror for backup purposes. Looked good in theory right? Except, I forgot to do one critical thing, test my backups. […]

I needed something like zfs-auto-snapshot written by Tim Foster but portable so it works on all systems that support ZFS. I reviewed a few scripts on github and was unhappy with what was out there so I decided to write my own. With zbackup.rb you can define what to snapshot and how many rotation days […]

Update: The following information could be beneficial to some, however my issues actually were with Caviar black drives shipping with TLER disabled. You need to pay Western Digital a premium for their “RAID” drives with TLER enabled. So for anyone reading this, avoid consumer Western Digital drives if you plan on using them for RAID. […]

Recently a primary boot disk went bad on our server and I got blind sided by a non-bootable secondary mirror disk. All the data was intact but I could not boot it. This required a slow re-installation and migration process that took a very long time. • EFI partitioned drives are not ZFS bootable. • […]