Backing up NTFS to ZFS (=> permissions)?

[ekr]

Hello,

I hope this is the correct forum...

What's the best way to backup a NTFS file system to a ZFS dataset or volume in a non-AD scenario?

I see these possibilities:

- rsync onto a ZFS dataset
- Samba/CIFS + robocopy (or some other Windows tool) onto a ZFS dataset
- Mounting a NTFS formatted ZVOL on the Windows box and then robocopy onto that

The third option seems to be most promising to me, since it will probably handle all ACL/permission cases including owner information etc.. The only drawback being that you have a fixed size, as usual, which destroys one of the biggest benefits of ZFS for me (the variable size).

Is there *any* way to get a decent amount of the "Meta" information without using a ZVOL? I played around with rsync/samba and it was very limited, for example when backing up the "Users" directory with all the shenannigans of modern Windowses...

I would accept a specialized Windows backup software for that if it plays well with the ZFS approach (i.e., I would not be a fan of using an imaging software like Acronis Trueimage which just creates huge monolithic (and everchanging) files on the target directory, hence making ZFS snapshots etc. useless.

Thanks for any feedback!

[raulfg3]

+1 for rsync but i personally use your second option and freefilesync to do manually sync. (my copy is music and movies so i do not need to copy metadata or users permissions).

[alexey123]

I use rsync+ deltacopy few years

[ekr]

Thank you. I am using rsync myself right now; my problem is that I basically had to disable all metadata to get it to work reliably (that is "rsync -av --delete --no-p --no-g --chmod=ugo=rwX"). I played around with the other possibilities (fake-root mainly) but was not successful so far. There would always be some cases where rsync got "permission denied" on the receiving side; I might be able to fiddle around until it seems to work, but it does not give me a good feeling so far.