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What would ZFS get me? My current setup is NFS with mdadm raid 1.

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I mean I personally love the zfs send and recv snapshot functionality.

It allows you to do block level backups.

ie: when you go to use a regular backup program it will scan the entirety of your drive to determine what files changed, zfs already knows this because that's the entire point of snapshots so it just….sends the changes, no scanning! This ends up being an extremely efficient and fast way to handle backups.

Being a modern checksumming filesystem it also gives you "bitrot" or general corruption protection which mdadm won't. This property isn't to exciting until your drives die, then it's suddenly super useful.

There's other benefits that exist like transparent compression, built-in encryption or the general UX of tooling that are small but add up to a very enjoyable stack to use.

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Does it let me configure redundancy like Raid1?

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Yes, absolutely.

They use their own terminology as there's sometimes low level differences, but they're only improvement over traditional raid ime.

RAID1 would be equivalent to a "mirror"

RAID0 would be equivalent to a "stripe"

RAID10 would be equivalent to "striped mirrors"

It also has topologies like RAID5 / RAID6 in the form of raidz1, raidz2 etc.

One of the reasons for the good UX is that zfs controls all layers of the stack.

Everything from actual drive management to the filesystem level is handled by zfs. You don't have to interact with multiple different subsystems by different authors to achieve good results (eg RedHats Stratis system where mdadm is one part of many).

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Hmm, I'm looking on setting up a remote back up of my current setup, I think I'll play with ZFS for that.

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It's super slick.

The zfs send command just dumps a bytestream that you vomit over ssh into zfs recv - very unixy!

It's ideal for remote backups because it'll only send the exact delta of changes so you can minimize the data transfer a ton.

Only thing to watch out for is making sure you understand how snapshots relate to the zfs send. (Ex: if you need to have a common snapshot for the new one to apply.)

Highly recommend Allan Jude's books as I said before.

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