Failed replications

[John Gorst]

System: HP microserver 54L, 8gb RAM, 2x3TB HDD as a mirror, 8GB USB boot, 1x64gb SSD (ada2), FreeNas 9.3 stable

I am running a VM of Windows 7 off the single ZFS SSD volume for speed (sacrificing security)

I am running ZFS snapshots on the volume and wish to replicate this to my main 3TB mirrored pool locally.

I run snapshots of the SSD every day with a 2 week expiry, and every 2 weeks with a 2 month expiry.

The initial replication to my main pool works fine unit a few days in I get an email EVERY MINUTE with

Hello,
The replication failed for the local ZFS ssd/VM because the remote system
has diverged snapshots with us.
​

I presume this is because I currently run snapshots of my entire 3tb pool in a recursive fashion. This will then run snapshots of the replicated SSD snapshots (if that makes sense) hence causing this error message?

1) Does FreeNas really need to email me every minute about this (deleting 150 identical emails in the morning is not fun!)

2) I presume I just need to stop running additional snapshots of the replicated version..... however I would like to keep the additional snapshots going if possible as I can fit much more on my 3tb pool therefore keeping very old versions. Is this possible?

Thanks for any pointers

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I think you're right about the source of the problem.

Assuming you're running Windows in a VirtualBox jail, it might be worth trying a different approach, e.g. running backups from Windows to the main pool. One reason to consider this approach is that you can't necessarily restore a working VirtualBox VM from a snapshot that was taken while the VM was running. It'll probably work most of the time, but not necessarily the one time you really need it, since that requires the hypervisor to cooperate with the snapshots [1].

[1] or something like that.