I just attached a new volume to my vps and usually I follow the instructions provided using parted and mkfs.ext4 but I decided to try ZFS.

The guides I’ve found online are all very different and I’m not sure if I did everything correct to know the data will be safe.
What I mean is running lsblk -o name,size,fstype,type,mountpoint shows this

NAME     SIZE FSTYPE   TYPE MOUNTPOINT
vdb      100G          disk
└─vdb1   100G ext4     part /mnt/storage
vdc      100G          disk
├─vdc1   100G          part
└─vdc9     8M          part

You can see the type and mountpoint of the previous volume are listed, but the ZFS’ ones aren’t.

Still I can properly access the ZFS pool I created and I also already copied some test data.

root@vps:~/services# zpool list
NAME         SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
local-zfs   99.5G  6.88G  92.6G        -         -     0%     6%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
root@vps:~/services# zfs list
NAME         USED  AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT
local-zfs   6.88G  89.5G     6.88G  /mnt/zfs

The commands I ran were these ones

parted -s /dev/vdc mklabel gpt
parted -s /dev/vdc unit mib mkpart primary 0% 100%
zpool create -o ashift=12 -O canmount=on -O atime=off -O recordsize=8k -O compression=lz4 -O mountpoint=/mnt/zfs local-zfs /dev/vdc

Does this look good?
Should I do something else? (like writing something to fstab)

The list of properties is very long, is there any one you recommend I should look into for a simple server where currently non-critical data is stored?
(I already have a separate backup solution, maybe I’ll check to update it later)

  • @LufyCZEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    Dedup is apparently very very resource intensive and not worth the load unless you’re expecting 5x+ reductions in space usage

    Probably depends though

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Oh, for some reason I thought the reason to remove it was that it limited or broke some of the built-in sanity checking to maintain data integrity. I do remember reading in a number of places that it absolutely should be turned off at all times, but it’s been awhile since I set up a new zfs pool so I was just going off my notes of what settings I use (and confirmed I still used those on all the current pools).