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The one thing in the article I agree with without reservation though is that you should always have a backup of your pool! ZFS makes doing good backups easy, w

The one thing in the article I agree with without reservation though is that you should always have a backup of your pool! ZFS makes doing good backups easy, with zfs send | zfs receive.

gh02t 6y ago
I mean, is this controversial? The problem for a budget conscious home user is: where do you back up to? Doing a complete backup to a remote storage provider isn't a practical option for many users, which leaves the affordable options being to only back up critical data and/or use something like a big USB external drive. Neither of these options are great, so in reality many people end up relying on RAID or mirroring to provide some measure of redundancy regardless of whether or not it's a good idea.
- benlivengood 6y ago
  I just started playing around with s3blkdevd. S3-compatible storage at backblaze B2 is $0.005/GB-month and I'll see if I can manage a vdev made out of a huge nbd disk. Topical to the article, backblaze has piles of RAID6 and appears to be happy with it. Another thought has been to find a ZFS-friend in another part of the world and exchange snapshots. Inline encryption makes that a little more viable now. Right now I'm sending incremental snapshots to AWS Glacier and have another local box mirroring the data (mostly to fully verify the snapshots before sending them to Glacier).
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  I have a raidz2 that I keep everything on: (A) Personal, (B) core media, and (C) all other media. I backup A and B on a workstation drive, and I further backup A to S3 Glacier for $1/month/100GB, syncing every few months. It isn't all or nothing, 3-copies vs. striped pool. Mirrors are fine if you have quick access to fix dead drives, but I like the idea of being able to lose any two drives vs. only one drive in a given mirror. And while I currently have a 4 drive RAIDz2 (same disk utilization as a mirror) I wish I had a 4+2 array, which I'll probably build next year.
  - gh02t 6y ago
    Yeah, this is basically what I do as well, I didn't mean to imply it is all or nothing. The practical solution is tiered backup of the stuff you really care about + some local fault tolerance for stuff you don't care about as much. What I wanted to point out is that of course backing up everything is the solution per the parent comment, but the reality is that costs for punting and mindlessly backing up say 10 TB of data properly are still fairly high. So you pick and choose the important stuff and do the best you can for the rest.

The one thing in the article I agree with without reservation though is that you should always have a backup of your pool! ZFS makes doing good backups easy, with zfs send | zfs receive.

gh02t 6y ago

I mean, is this controversial? The problem for a budget conscious home user is: where do you back up to? Doing a complete backup to a remote storage provider isn't a practical option for many users, which leaves the affordable options being to only back up critical data and/or use something like a big USB external drive. Neither of these options are great, so in reality many people end up relying on RAID or mirroring to provide some measure of redundancy regardless of whether or not it's a good idea.

benlivengood 6y ago
I just started playing around with s3blkdevd. S3-compatible storage at backblaze B2 is $0.005/GB-month and I'll see if I can manage a vdev made out of a huge nbd disk. Topical to the article, backblaze has piles of RAID6 and appears to be happy with it. Another thought has been to find a ZFS-friend in another part of the world and exchange snapshots. Inline encryption makes that a little more viable now. Right now I'm sending incremental snapshots to AWS Glacier and have another local box mirroring the data (mostly to fully verify the snapshots before sending them to Glacier).
unethical_ban 6y ago
I have a raidz2 that I keep everything on: (A) Personal, (B) core media, and (C) all other media. I backup A and B on a workstation drive, and I further backup A to S3 Glacier for $1/month/100GB, syncing every few months. It isn't all or nothing, 3-copies vs. striped pool. Mirrors are fine if you have quick access to fix dead drives, but I like the idea of being able to lose any two drives vs. only one drive in a given mirror. And while I currently have a 4 drive RAIDz2 (same disk utilization as a mirror) I wish I had a 4+2 array, which I'll probably build next year.
- gh02t 6y ago
  Yeah, this is basically what I do as well, I didn't mean to imply it is all or nothing. The practical solution is tiered backup of the stuff you really care about + some local fault tolerance for stuff you don't care about as much. What I wanted to point out is that of course backing up everything is the solution per the parent comment, but the reality is that costs for punting and mindlessly backing up say 10 TB of data properly are still fairly high. So you pick and choose the important stuff and do the best you can for the rest.