Ivan - ZFS Backups

Hello Allan and Kris,

I've been working on a little script to help me with site backups. Since site
files don't change often I though of using ZFS and its snapshot feature as
destination combination for site backups.

What I planned to do is to backup files to that remote ZFS location and then
create ZFS snapshot with:

zfs snapshot backup@`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`

Every time new data backs up it should overwrite the existing data and new
snapshot will be created. That should (at least in theory) save huge amounts of
space (vs backing up same data over and over, since snapshots are just deltas,
right?) but I am not exactly sure on how should I approach file restores so I
could really use advice from Mr. ZFS (Allan).

Issuing:

zfs rollback backup@SOMEOLDERDATE

would result in followiing error:

cannot rollback to 'backup@SOMEOLDERDATE': more recent snapshots or bookmarks
exist
use '-r' to force deletion of the following snapshots and bookmarks:
---LIST-OF-SNAPSHOTS---

Instead I should probably use zfs send and pipe it to a new location? Example:

zfs send backup@SOMEOLDERDATE > /backup/SOMEOLDERDATE

or is there a better way? How would you approach this issue?

Thank you in advance.

P.S. Snapshoting at the source server and then issuing zfs send would be the
best solution, and I may do that in the future but it isn't really relevant for
this "issue".

Kind regards,

--
Ivan