OpenZFS on OS X

Sorry, that was poor wording on my part. You can use cron, but cron is deprecated and may go away at some point. I'm surprised that it hasn't disappeared entirely yet. This little project was an excuse to learn some of the mysteries of launchd, staying within the lanes of what Apple recommends.

I've used zfs-auto-snapshot (https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs-auto-snapshot) for years, but for some reason I've long disabled it in OS X. My Ubuntu and Proxmox servers run fine with it.

To make a long story short, based on advice from this forum, I tried znapzend on my Mac running the latest Big Sur / OpenZFS over the weekend, and was really impressed: it can be installed either by Homebrew, or via the GitHub page (https://github.com/oetiker/znapzend - ran into some permissions issues in the end, but opted for that).

Of note, it creates snapshots on the source dataset, but also replicates (via zfs send) to a backup location.

It was a revelation to update the backup of a 40G file (that used to take a loooong time with rsync) in just a few seconds!

Hey hey!

Am glad to hear you had a go using zfs snd/rcv to backup that 40GB file via snapzend.

ZFS is so nice for backing up… glad you like!