ZFS and Third-Party Backup Product Issues

The following are the issues with the Veritas NetBackup and Brightstor ARCserve Backup products.

Veritas NetBackup Does Not Back Up and Preserve Files With ZFS/NFSv4 ACLs (6352899)

The Veritas NetBackup product can be used to back up ZFS files, and this configuration is supported. However, this product does not currently support backing up or restoring NFSv4-style ACL information from ZFS files. Traditional permission bits and other file attributes are correctly backed up and restored.

If a user tries to back up or restore ZFS files, the NFSv4-style ACL information from ZFS files is silently dropped. There is no error message indicating that the ACL information from ZFS files has been dropped.

Support for ZFS/NFSv4 ACLs is under development and is expected to be available in the next Veritas NetBackup release.

Workaround 1:

As of the Solaris 10 7/07 HW release, both the tar and cpio commands correctly handle ZFS files with NFSv4-style ACLs.

Use the tar command with the -p option or the cpiocommand with the -P option to write the ZFS files to a file. Then, use the Veritas NetBackup to back up the tar or cpio archive.

Workaround 2:

As an alternative to using Veritas NetBackup, use the ZFS send and receive commands to back up ZFS files. These commands correctly handle all attributes of ZFS files.

BrightStor ARCserve Backup Client Agent for UNIX (Solaris) and ZFS Support

The BrightStor ARCserve Backup (BAB) Client Agent for UNIX (Solaris) can be used to backup and restore ZFS files.

However, ZFS NFSv4-style ACLs are not preserved during backup. Traditional UNIX file permissions and attributes are preserved.

Workaround: If you want to preserve ZFS files with NFSv4-style ACLs, use the tar command with the -p option or the cpio command with the -P option to write the ZFS files to a file. Then, use BAB to backup the tar or cpio archive.