On 8/9/2024 13:18, Ted Spradley wrote:
On Thu, 08 Aug 2024 18:11:07 -0400
Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> 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.
NetBSD
I 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.
General
As Greg alluded, your "live" ZFS datasets (even if mirrored etc) should
not be considered a backup itself.
-Joel
