The existing system: I have a FreeBSD based backup/archive server, which pulls the backups from the live servers via rsync every night and does a zfs snapshot to archive the backup contents for a specific time.
This results in the situation, that on this server there are lots of ...
- ... rsync tasks,
- ... storage pools (one for every backup task the server fullfills),
- ... snapshot tasks on that pools with different creation rules (from every 5 minutes to daily) and different retention times (from 3 days to 5 years),
- ... already existing snapshots (~8k).
The task I want to accomplish now:
I want to build a offsite server that is a perfect mirror of this backup server and which is syncing daily with the above described system.
The Problem:
I haven't found any solution yet, which lets me easily sync the whole server / zfs filesystem including all snapshots. I only know that you can send a single snapshot to a remote zfs filesystem via zfs send. Obviously it would be great to not have to recreate the complex pool & snapshot structure on the offsite server because I feel this would be a total mess maintenance wise.
Is there any solution which allows to mirror a complete zfs filesystem including snapshots?