Snapshot stored on another volumn?

[realdreams]

I have a ZFS volumn of 3 HDDs in RAID0(1TB*3). I want to add a 3TB drive for periodic backup. How can I set up periodic snapshot to store the backup on the new drive?

1. Is there any special requirement for the 3TB drive? i/o performance, filesystem etc.?
2. Is it possible to use a disk smaller than 3TB for snapshot if the actual used space is way less than 3TB(actually less than 1TB)?
3. How much does snapshot process impact the performance? I use the ZFS volumn for vSphere iSCSI and CIFS.
4. Any concerns with this method? RAID0 probably should never be used but the data is not that critical. With $ constraints, this is the best way I can think of. Any suggestions?


Thanks.

 

[ProtoSD]

I'm not sure you understand what/how snapshots work, I know in the beginning it wasn't clear to me either.

http://forums.freenas.org/showthread.php?3919-Where-are-ZFS-snapshots-actually-stored&highlight=snapshots+stored

2) It's possible, but again the question makes it seem like you don't understand them.
3) Snapshots do not really affect performance at all, they're basically just metadata.

I think what you thinking about might be replication, but you should really post back and explain what you're trying to do/what the goal is.

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Replication_Tasks

 

[realdreams]

Thanks. What I am trying to do is to enable snapshot but store it on another volume (providing backups to rollback to while conserving space on the original volume)?
There are some ways to just mirror the ZFS volume but I haven't found a way to do exactly what I want.

 

[ipburbank]

Perhaps a more useful approach would be to store a snapshot and all the blocks specific to that snapshot. Is that possible?