Basic Maintenance Best Practices

OpenZFS
1

Hello folks,

So I am in month 3-4 of ZFS usage and loving it. I wanted to see what folks would recommend as best practices for maintaining the filesystem.

Here’s what you are working with:

  • a single laptop hard drive with 500GB
  • OS: NixOS 24.05
  • Encrypted ZFS
  • 10 or less snapshots
  • 3 datasets
  • Local Backups are taken from snapshots using Borg backup to a hard drive before shut down
  • Cloud Backups are taken from snapshots using rclone to Backblaze before shut down.
  • how we got here: @mercenary_sysadmin kept talking about ZFS so I did a “ready, fire, aim” with my personal laptop after double-checking my backups via test restores

As always, happy to clarify something that’s asked, just know I might be failing to read the “Face toward enemy” label on the equipment.

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Sounds good so far.

  • Have you set up sanoid to manage your snapshots for you?
  • Have you looked into using ZFS replication in your backup/restore strategy?
  • Do you have any kind of ZFS boot environment set up?
3

I like this approach (backup on shutdown). I am using ZFS on a drive on my desktop so will look into this too. May not be worth it for me because all data (docs/pics/media) are smlinks to my NAS or accessible via app. I am using ZFS on desktop for snapshots and data integrity - all important data is on my NAS which has ZFS snapshots, send/recv backup etc. etc. to another NAS which is only turned on for backup.

I am looking for a tool that reports SMART changes or zpool status errors and will put up a desktop notification and perhaps live in the system tray. I may write this myself but not put in any research time to find such a tool yet - but feel this would go well with ZFS on desktops.

Off topic: I use a remote desktop to LibreOffice container via Docker to edit documents. I access photos via Immich app, and media via Jellyfin (both hosted on primary NAS). I am trying to treat primary desktop OS as disposable expect home folder, which is backed up to NAS.

4

So to follow-up on this thread, I did setup sanoid on my laptop for auto snapshot and pruning along with turning on auto scrubbing weekly. One of the 2.5 admins episode clips wouldn’t stop rattling in my brain. Man that’s a better plan than manually snapshots.

I am nearly there on the ZFS replication thanks to the latest episode of 2.5 admins feedback section, it cause stuff to click about replicating my materials encrypted. Need to check that my datasets are encrypted, pretty sure they are but always worth a check. Probably just need to dig up a command to check that.

As far as a ZFS boot environment, I have no clue unfortunately. Back to the “ready, fire, aim” scenario, I put NixOS on my laptop and just followed the instructions on their wiki (ZFS - NixOS Wiki).

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