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!

  • terribleplan@lemmy.nrd.liEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    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).

    • irreducible12302@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • r0ckr@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        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.