From my last posting about ZFS “Fun with ZFS send and receive” we see that the ZFS commands are really easy to use but very powerful, because of this I find it easy to write scripts to do the things I need. Here is some code that I use for snapshots, it’s written in python but can be ported to anything as it’s taking command line output and parsing info for what it needs.

For the people who haven’t had the opportunity to play around with ZFS, it’s a powerful filesystem which lets you easily manage storage with very simple commands. Right now you can use ZFS within FreeBSD, OpenSolaris and Solaris and there are also ports for Linux, MacOS and NetBSD but they still in the works and something I wouldn’t use in production. For this posting we will be looking at some ways you can use zfs send and zfs receive command and how they can help you manage your storage along with combining them with other Unix tools.