OneFS facilitates performant backup and restore functionality through its support of the ubiquitous Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP). NDMP is an open-standard protocol that provides interoperability with leading data-backup products and OneFS supports both NDMP versions 3 and 4. OneFS also supports both direct NDMP (referred to as 2-way NDMP), and remote NDMP (referred to as 3-way NDMP) topologies.
The OneFS NDMP module includes the following functionality:
- Full and incremental backups and restores using NDMP
- Direct Access Restore/Directory Direct Access Restore (DAR/DDAR), single-file restores, and three-way backups
- Restore-to-arbitrary systems
- Seamless integration with access control lists (ACLs), alternate data streams, and resource forks
- Selective file recovery
- Replicate then backup
- Multistream NDMP backup
- Backup Restartable Extension (BRE) and multistream BRE
While some backup software vendors may support backing up OneFS over SMB and NFS, the advantages of using NDMP include:
- Increased performance
- Retention of file attributes and security and access controls
- Backups use automatically generated snapshots for point-in-time consistency.
- Redirector automatically distributes two-way NDMP local backup or restore operations to nodes with less load.
- Throttler manages CPU usage of backup, ensuring that NDMP operations do not overwhelm any nodes.
- Extensive support by backup software vendors
- Integration with CloudPools, allowing backup of Smartlinked files as regular files or stubs (with or without data).
