How to backup FreeNas zvol to S3 storage

Context

• I have a FreeNAS setup
• I want a cheap offsite backup solution
• Backblaze only offer S3 storage solution
• I have virtual machines on zvol to backup (not just files)
• ZFS send/receive is very convenient if you have another zfs system in other
  location

I choose zfsbackup-go, this tool use zfs send/receive to generate archives on S3 storage space. This software is not ready for very critical use, still in « beta » missing some features like deletation on remote location from the command line.

Advantages

• Can backup zvol as well as dataset
• Differential backups based on snapshots
• Encrypted backups
• Compressed backups
• Compatible with all S3 solutions

Drawbacks

• You can’t use backups without re-import in a ZFS pool (so real backups
  not a archives solution)
• Still in beta

How to

1. (Optional) Build zfsbackup-go for freebsd with crosscompile from a linux
   1. You need GO
   2. git clone git@github.com:someone1/zfsbackup-go.git
   3. GOOS=freebsd GOARCH=amd64 go build -o zfsbackup main.go
2. Generate a gpg key gpg --full-generate-key

   Learn gpg getting started

3. Export the private/public gpg keys

   1. gpg --list-keys
   2. gpg --export-secret-keys -a keyid
   3. gpg --export -a keyid

   How to export keys

4. Create the S3 credentials you need
   I use BackBlaze because it’s the cheapper one, but you can use every S3 storage service or implementation you want.

5. Configure periodic snapshot in FreeNas
   

6. Configure zfsbackup cron task
   

   • You need to ensure the schedule is after the snapshot
   • I have develop a very little script to have a more simpler crontask because zfsbackup only support one Dataset at a time
   • Command DATASETS="Tank/Dataset1 Tank/Group/Data1" /root/zfsbackup.sh

   #!/bin/bash
   export B2_ACCOUNT_ID=
   export B2_ACCOUNT_KEY=
   export PGP_PASSPHRASE=
   PGP_EMAIL=
   PGP_PUBLIC_RING=
   PGP_PRIVATE_RING=
   S3_DEST=
   for dataset in $DATASETS
   do
     /root/zfsbackup send --encryptTo $PGP_EMAIL --signFrom $PGP_EMAIL --publicKeyRingPath $PGP_PUBLIC_RING --secretKeyRingPath $PGP_PRIVATE_RING --fullIfOlderThan 2160h $dataset $S3_DEST
   done
   

Conclusion

• This solution offer very good performance like 15MB/s during backup operation with only 10% cpu usage on Xeon D1521. My Orange ISP uplink is the limitation here.
• With incremental snapshot, BackBlaze is a very effective solution at low cost like less than 60€ a year for a 100GB on disk backuped VM.
• DO BACKUPS
• DO BACKUPS
• DO BACKUPS