Hey guys, thanks for reading this.
Windows (and DOS before) guy here, I know very little about FreeBSD and ZFS apart from what I’ve read, that’s why I’m resorting to this forum. I want to set up a FreeBSD ZFS system (boot drive + another two drives of 2TB each) for backup purposes. I may also use the system lightly (web surfing or email). The data is going be always online (powered 24/7), but only rarely accessed (either directly or over a local network) and also rarely updated. I’m thinking FreeBSD because it’s stable, secure and free (and I’m excited to play with a new OS) and ZFS because of its focus on data integrity.
My questions:
Windows (and DOS before) guy here, I know very little about FreeBSD and ZFS apart from what I’ve read, that’s why I’m resorting to this forum. I want to set up a FreeBSD ZFS system (boot drive + another two drives of 2TB each) for backup purposes. I may also use the system lightly (web surfing or email). The data is going be always online (powered 24/7), but only rarely accessed (either directly or over a local network) and also rarely updated. I’m thinking FreeBSD because it’s stable, secure and free (and I’m excited to play with a new OS) and ZFS because of its focus on data integrity.
My questions:
- I’m not planning for any RAID-like setup. I’d rather manually copy the exact same data to the two drives (so they’re exact replicas of one another) and keep them independent instead of pooling them. This way, if one drive fails I’ll just replace it and copy the data from the remaining drive. Wouldn’t this eliminate any potential issues with the matrix/pool failing to be rebuilt and leading to data loss? Also if I accidentally delete something (or it gets corrupted) I could retrieve it from the other drive regardless of what happened afterwards. Am I missing something here, isn’t keeping the drives independent (and manually mirrored) much safer? Why is everyone recommending RAIDs?
- Assuming a power failure, or similar event, that would mess up the file structure (not the drive itself), are there any tools to attempt to recover the data from a ZFS drive? I’ve read some stories that have me worried (e.g. http://mbruning.blogspot.com/2009/12/zfs-data-recovery.html) including how ZFS is not that stable under FreeBSD.
- Would encryption lower the odds of a successful drive recovery should something go wrong? I’d say so but I’m looking for confirmation.
- Do you need ECC memory to fully take advantage of ZFS? I know you need plenty.