Automaticly selects filesystems to backup by looking at a simple ZFS property.
Creates consistent snapshots.
Is able to "push" and "pull" the backups via SSH.
Also supports local backups.
Even supports pulling data from a source-host and pushing backup to target host by ssh.
Can be scheduled via a simple cronjob orrun directly from commandline.
Backups and snapshots can be named to prevent conflicts. (multiple backups from and to the same filesystems are no problem)
Always creates new snapshots, even if the previous backup was aborted.
Ability to 'finish' aborted backups to see what goes wrong.
Checks everything and aborts on errors.
Only on host needs the zfs_autobackup script. The other host just needs ssh and the zfs command.
Written in python and uses zfs-commands, no 3rd party dependencys or libraries.
Easy to debug and has a test-mode. Actual unix commands are printed.

Example usage

In this example we're going to backup a SmartOS machine called smartos01 to our fileserver called fs1.

Its important to choose a uniq and consistent backup name. In this case we name our backup: smartos01_fs1.

Select filesystems to backup

On the source zfs system set the autobackup:name zfs property.

[root@smartos01 ~]# zfs get -t filesystem autobackup:smartos01_fs1
NAME                                                PROPERTY                  VALUE                     SOURCE
zones                                               autobackup:smartos01_fs1  true                      local
zones/1eb33958-72c1-11e4-af42-ff0790f603dd          autobackup:smartos01_fs1  true                      inherited from zones
zones/3c71a6cd-6857-407c-880c-09225ce4208e          autobackup:smartos01_fs1  true                      inherited from zones
zones/3c905e49-81c0-4a5a-91c3-fc7996f97d47          autobackup:smartos01_fs1  true                      inherited from zones