Create a zfs mirror with encryption on a thinkpad e14 gen2

Hi, I am new to zfs, I recently purchased a thinkpad e14 gen2 which has 2 x m.2 slots, which I have put 2 x 1gb drives into.

  • How would I install zfs in a mirror with encryption with ubuntu 24.04 LTS on top?
  • I have heard on libera chat that zfs encryption causes data corruption, what are peoples experience on this? what are the alternatives to using zfs native encryption ?

Thanks`

There’s a very good guide to installing Ubuntu on ZFS here. It’s written for 22.04, but it should work fine for 24.04.

I do use native ZFS encryption on several systems and I haven’t seen any issues. Small sample size, but anecdotal evidence is something. I’ve heard of issues with certain edge cases in raw ZFS send/recv. I’ve had a couple instances where zpool status claims a corrupt file with a weird hex file name that doesn’t map to any real file.

I use zfs encryption on all my devices (laptop, desktop, and sever) and have never experienced the data corruption bugs mentioned when doing send/recv. After I first read about it, I make sure to check my bkup zfs store every once in awhile, but everything is good so far.

That being said, if I was doing a clean install of everything today with the knowledge I have, I don’t know what I would do. There has been enough talk about it to concern me, and yet I feel like I’m a moderate user and have never seen it personally. However, if I do see it, I imagine I’ll see it when it’s the least convenient and then I’ll have to use my cloud backups instead. ┐⁠(⁠ ⁠∵⁠ ⁠)ā ā”Œ

Others have covered the install options. I’ll only add that you can install to a single drive and when everything looks good, you can partition the second drive to match and then add the partitions to create mirrors. There’s probably some fiddling to get full duplication (EFI partition, grub/syslinux and stuff like that.)

I’ve been using native encryption on my laptop (single drive) and get ā€œpermanent errorsā€ reported if I run full pool backups hourly using syncoid. These have all been in snapshots and if I stop the backups, they eventually go away as the corresponding snapshot is deleted. So far this has not been a problem, but as always YMMV.

I have heard on libera chat that zfs encryption causes data corruption, what are peoples experience on this? what are the alternatives to using zfs native encryption ?

Outsides of power loss scenarios, I believe that most of the reported issues were around using ZFS send/receive to send snapshots to another system (please correct me if I’m wrong), not just using ZFS encryption on a system.

I run ZFS encryption on my home servers, laptop, and NAS these days, and use replication as part of my backup strategy for select datasets on my laptop and server. I have not encountered any data loss bugs, yet.

If this is a concern for you, and you want to use ZFS with encryption, then you have a few options:

  • Adopt a second strategy for backups - use rsync or some other thing (Borg, etc.) that isn’t ZFS replication to mitigate the risk. (This is my strategy, personally. My external backup drives are encrypted via LUKS.)

  • Use a different encryption (e.g. LUKS) to encrypt the device, then create your pools on top of the decrypted logical devices that LUKS provides. I’ve used this extensively in a production capacity for 5+ years before native encryption was a thing for a distributed analytics cluster used by support and sustaining engineering teams for a tech company and it performed decently until the cluster was decommissioned after the company was acquired.

Would I use ZFS on LUKS again? No, I wouldn’t. It was only deployed because we had to use encryption and native encryption wasn’t yet an option. It’s harder to configure and there’s always a chance that an upgrade could break things. I’d go native encryption and mitigate data loss risks with a well tested backup strategy.

Thanks for all the responses.

Looks like I broke that URL when I pushed a 24.04 guide. In any case, a 24.04-specific guide is now available at Noble (24.04) UEFI — ZFSBootMenu 2.3.0 documentation

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