Best compression for ZFS send/recv

compressionsnapshotzfs

I'm sending incremental ZFS snapshots over a point-to-point T1 line and we're to a point where a day's worth of snapshots can barely make it over the wire before the next backup starts. Our send/recv command is:

zfs send -i tank/vm@2009-10-10 tank/vm@2009-10-12 | bzip2 -c | \
ssh offsite-backup "bzcat | zfs recv -F tank/vm"

I have plenty of CPU cycles to spare. Is there a better compression algorithm or alternative method I can use to push less data over the line?

Best Answer

It sounds like you've tried all of the best compression mechanisms and are still being limited by the line speed. Assuming running a faster line is out of the question, have you considered just running the backups less frequently so that they have more time to run?

Short of that, is there some kind of way to lower the amount of data being written? Without knowing your application stack its hard to say how, but just doing things like making sure apps are overwriting existing files instead of creating new ones might help. And making sure you arent saving backups of temp/cache files that you wont need.

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