On 8/9/2024 13:18, Ted Spradley wrote:
On Thu, 08 Aug 2024 18:11:07 -0400 Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:You obviously need to be creating multiple backups and taking at least some of them off site. That's true regardless of filesystem. I would say your exposure from all things not zfs flakiness is far greater than your exposure from zfs issues.Thanks everyone for your thoughtful advice. The concensus seems to be that it would be just fine, but I think that I'd better just push this conversion prroject further down the priority queue, and maybe move better backups up the priority queue. What I have now has been working just fine for a few years now.
Hi Ted -- I meant to add just a couple more things -- and its Friday so I have time :) I use ZFS on both FreeBSD and NetBSD -- sharing notes applying to both.
FreeBSD:I use ZFS on FreeBSD for all of my photos and videos for my family. ZFS snapshots for backups and the ability to do simple disc mirroring is the main features I love.
I use FreeBSD and ZFS mostly out of habit -- first used over a decade ago. All ZFS features I use are available on NetBSD ZFS.
For backups, I do 2 things, 1) USB3 dual bay drive docking station for physical backups, 2) rclone utility to push backups to online storage.
For #1, I keep 2 4Tb drives which are ZFS mirrored and use the USB3 docking station to 'zfs send' snapshots (diffs) to a pool on those mirrored drives. This is a quick and efficient way to do backups. I keep those 2 physical drives in a safe place in a fireproof box.
For #2, checkout https://rclone.org/ for doing rsync-like backups to various online services.
It's even possible to send ZFS snapshots to these clouds (don't need rclone). I've been meaning to explore this with cheap online "blob storage" services.
NetBSDI do image processing (ffmpeg for time-lapse, opencv for processing) on a 4Gb PINE64 RockPro64 running NetBSD 10-RELEASE. I have an ePCI card attached with an SSD which uses ZFS with multiple datasets. This image processing is enough stress in my opinion, and I've had no issues at all. There are cases where I need to do snapshots for aging out images.
Where I really appreciate ZFS on my RockPro64 is when doing kernel/release builds. Instead of backing up config changes and obj/, I just do a ZFS snapshot. If things go bad, I simply revert.
4Gb is probably considered to be on the lower end of a ZFS machine, but my datasets aren't that large, and my snapshots are continuously pruned.
GeneralAs Greg alluded, your "live" ZFS datasets (even if mirrored etc) should not be considered a backup itself.
-Joel