Now that it’s all set up, I gotta say, I think zetaback is the best thing since sliced bread for backing up big file servers.

We have an OpenSolaris file server with about 3TB of data, mostly in home directories.  The kind of work my users do means that a lot of this data is in millions of small files.  A full backup via rsync took a week; even a mostly empty incremental would take several hours due to rsync having to walk the tree and stat all those files.  zetaback did a full backup in about two and a half days (mostly limited by the CPU speed of my backup server, since I’m using gzip compression) and an incremental took less than half an hour.

–
David Brodbeck
System Administrator, Linguistics
University of Washington

While I think that most of the accolades here go to the awesomeness that is ZFS, it is very nice to see that Zetaback has so elegantly made this magic accessible.

Congratulations to everyone what has made Zetaback what it is.