sanoid VS zfs-syncer

I’m on the other end of the spectrum. I like knowing the flags and settings I use to create the pools.

For snapshots and replication take a look at sanoid (https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid).

I use a combo of PBS and ZFS with Sanoid. The ZFS snapshots are nice because you define it all in a config file with frequent, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly snaps retained however you want. Importantly I use that on the root pool as well as my data pools. With PBS I have a custom retention config and have it backing up VMs and LXCs every couple hours. The PBS dedupe functionality makes it possible to keep full backups going back ages with minimal storage consumption, just the changed blocks. PBS is running inside a VM yes, but it’s storage is on another pool.

[3] https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid/

No, it's written by the developer of Sanoid and Syncoid. The foremost open source ZFS snapshotting tool. He contributes on this sub all the time.

Hi there! Not so much to answer your questions, but are you aware of Sanoid and syncoid? It does backup and remote Sync in the most seamless way. Perhaps this would solve some of your concerns...

If you want to backup yourself using zfs features, I'd suggest you set up Sanoid/Syncoid by Salter, along with zfs-syncer to clean up snapshots on the target, which syncoid won't do.

I just went back to sanoid. I have also looked at zfs-autobackup and might give that a try. I've been combining sanoid/syncoid with this script to clean up snapshots

FreeNAS locks down pkg by default, expecting you to get desired packages like Plex or Transmission from their GUI package manager, and I didn't really feel like finding a way to get Sanoid onto my NAS, so I created my own script to automate the process of pruning snapshots on my NAS from my desktop. I wound up with this script, and it works well for my simple needs.

I'm backing up to a FreeNAS, so installing Sanoid to it wouldn't be as easy as pkg install sanoid, so instead of finding a way to install Sanoid on my NAS I decided to just make my own program that will delete any snapshots that are on my target subvolume that aren't on my source subvolume. For my case, where I'm just backing up my home and root directories via sanoid --cron and then syncoid, it works perfectly fine.