Allen - ZFS Send/Rcv

Hi, Kris, Allan.

I’ve been watching the show for a while now.  I became aware of zfs when Apple released a read-only version about a decade ago.  FreeBSD seemed to be the best solution for my home project (more on that later), and I haven’t looked back.

I built my home NAS box on a box I spec’d years ago.  I knew my research was valid when the IXSystems FreeNAS Mini had nearly the same hardware.  My NAS stores my 15K+ RAW pictures, multi-hosted WAN accessible server, and serves as my PLEX home theater PC.  I have a nearly lights out OTA recording system that downloads and moves the recompressed shows to the PLEX server.  The only thing I have to do is occasionally delete the recorded shows on my TABLO.  I currently use rsync to backup the server content to two rotating backup sets.

Now, to my problem: I’ve been experimenting with replacing rsync with zfs send/receive.  I can’t seem to find the right combination of options on the send and/or receive command or parameters of zfs itself.  The problem is some of the snapshots during a “zfs send -R -I ….” get resent even though a list of snapshots on the receive side shows the snapshot exists.  I’ve spent countless hours researching this problem, but can’t seem to find my specific situation.  The handbook is good as a ‘spec’ guide, but has limitations as a ‘user guide’.

Any thoughts on what I’m doing wrong?  Or better yet, is there a complete guide with real-world examples and best practices for zfs send/receive as an unmounted backup system.

regards,
Allen