Hello selfhosted lemmy community!
I’ve been running the following setup for a while now but my backup drive is running out of space.
- 2x 4TB drives in a zfs mirror
- 1x 1TB backup drive
- 1x 256GB boot ssd
The zfs pool is rsynced to the backup drive nightly which is then uploaded to blackblaze.
As I’m using more than 1 TB in the zfs pool, it can’t be backed up anymore. I’m looking for some advice on how to reuse the same drives in a better configuration.
My current idea is to get rid of the zfs pool, use one of the 4TB drives as the main drive and one as the backup one. The 1TB drive will then not be used anymore.
Appreciate any advice or feedback!
Can you backup directly to backblaze? Bypassing the 1TB drive?
That would indeed solve the problem. Although I’m a bit hesitant as I do like the peace of mind when having an additional copy. Otherwise I only have two real copies of my data.
I guess as the two drives are in a zfs mirror, restoring could still be done locally without pulling data from blackblaze. If I want to revert my data back to a previous state, I can’t do it with a local copy, so I would have to pull quite some data from blackblaze.
If you can afford it, buying a cheap 10TB external drive might be the best solution. I’m hesitant to recommend taking down the ZFS array, it does help with data reliability.
Yeah exactly, I think I’ll just upgrade the 1TB drive.
is data compressible? If it is and you are not using ZFS on 1Tb than converting it to ZFS give you some space. Plus you can use zfs snd| recive instead of rsync.
I didn’t know about zfs send receive, Ill take a look at that as the data is indeed compressible.
I would just buy a external drive, they’re been coming down in price anyway
I think buying a larger drive would indeed be the safest option.
ZFS is not a backup, but explicitly choosing to sacrifice the redundancy you have seems like the wrong move. By taking them out of mirroring you are guaranteed to only have what is in your backup in the case of failure, with no chance of recovery. IMO the correct answer is either to buy larger drives for backups or have less data (sacrilege).
How I have solved it for now is to keep using the current system but as a large part of the data is already a backup of devices around the house, those will only get backed up to blackblaze and not to the 1TB drive. All other files and server configs can then be stored in on that drive.
