I am building my 3-2-1 backup system and wanted to add an external HD to my TrueNAS machine. Since it only works with ZFS, I thought of setting up that drive as a compressed, dedup ZFS volume.

I have a truckload of NVMe left on the boot drive that I could repartition and turn some of the free space as a dedup vdev for the backup drive. I don’t have any other physical bays to add a dedicated drive on the machine.

A) Is that a bad idea? What are the downsides of using the boot drive like that?

B) Which tool do you recommend for local backup? I’m looking for actual incremental backup, not just a sync tool.

  • youRFate@feddit.deEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    Restic is my tool of choice for deduplicated encrypted verifiable compressed incremental backups.

    • acockworkorange@mander.xyzOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      In that case, what would be better in terms of memory / CPU usage: dedup and compression at the filesystem level or disabling it and doing it at the tool level?

      • youRFate@feddit.deEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        You can’t dedup/compress restic repos at fs level due to the encryption.

        Nice thing is you get those even with „dumb“ targets that can‘t do those for you.