sanoid VS zrepl

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...

Lastly there is zrepl. This is an automatic snapshot creation, pruning and replication daemon. It lets you automate the creation of ZFS snapshots at specific intervals, apply a retention policy to them, and replicate them out to a remote system with ZFS, like a NAS with TrueNAS on it.

I run it in a FreeBSD jail and take frequent ZFS snapshots using zrepl. I’ve had to restore after failed updates and it worked flawlessly.

As others have noted, I use syncoid but zrepl is an alternative that could be considered.

I’m going to throw out Zrepl again because it’s amazing: https://zrepl.github.io/

Current idea: We offer some form of container each other, where we have that zvol mounted somewhere for the replication use. This would mean that I could create an "inside zfs" where I create a filebased zpool. How is performance on a filebased zpool? (Although it is technically not so important that it performs critically, just trying to find the - or one of - "best" ways). Then we would offer each an ssh endpoint into that container (It doesn't have to be ssh, but it is so far convenient to setup and resilient to be open to the public). And my current plan is to use zrepl (https://zrepl.github.io/) to organise replication from my home server to this "inside" zpool.