"Which would push-replicate the specified ZFS filesystem from the local host to remotehost over an SSH tunnel ..."
syncoid root@remotehost:data/images/vm backup/images/vm
If only ...
rsync.net pricing is 2.5c per GB, per month with no other charges possible, regardless of usage.
I feel like we're in the ballpark there ...
As a bonus, you can do things like this:
ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/some/bucket rsync/home/dir
ssh user@rsync.net rclone gdrive:/blah s3:/some/bucket
> Now, if only there were a cloud storage provider that you could directly zfs-send to ...
Is there something on rsync.net's site that describes its support for zfs send?
I've found this old thread on HN referring to an Arstechnica article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10751269
and a reference to it on IXSystem's site:
https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/rsync-net-now-su...
but they're both back in 2015.
I can't find anything on the site, https://www.rsync.net/index.html, but I may be reading right past it.
"The last addition is the ability to do raw, encrypted sends and receives. The idea here is to send raw encrypted and compressed data and receive it exactly as is on a backup system. This means that the dataset on the receiving system is protected using the same user key that is in use on the sending side. By doing so, datasets can be efficiently backed up to an untrusted system without fear of data being compromised."
Unfortunately it's taking a long time for the feature to propagate through the ZFS implementations. I don't know if rsync.net's servers support it.
If you have multiple terabytes of data, zfs-send is a very efficient (and elegant) way to transfer them to rsync.net.
We can give you your own zpool, with root, running the latest production/stable ZoL code - so you will have encryption and raw send, etc.
However ...
If you have hundreds of GB up to ... one or two TB ... we paste this suggestion to you instead:
I think you should look into the 'borg' backup tool - it has become the de facto standard for remote backups because it does everything that rsync does (efficient, changes only backups) but also produces strongly encrypted remote backup sets that only you have a key to ... rsync.net has no access to the data.
The borg website is here:
https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
and a good description of how it works and why you should use it is here:
https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
... and our own page with details of our attic/borg support, along with a deeply discounted signup link, is here:
As for FreeNAS, I feel it gives the closest thing to a Synology NAS in terms of manageability through a GUI, etc, while also supporting ZFS.
Maintaining freenas and trying to run some other virtualized apps next to it was not good for me.
Yes, but depending on the size/value of the dataset, rsync might not be the best option.
Even after recent price reduction (Yay!), and with a hn discount (Yay!) - I still consider rsync.net as a personal backup service a little overkill/expensive past 100 GB or so. And likely you could just handle anything on the order of 1 to 2 tb locally anyway (spare disks).
You technically could use it for 10+tb of data... But uploading and downloading is going to be slow unless you have a real uplink (ie at least 1gbps).
And if you did, unless you need filesystem level Metadata - rsync might be a better option than zfs send/receive (even though zfs is cool).
>, rebuild my server, and then pull them back down into a reorganised/renamed tree of datasets?
Again, if you just need the data back - you might be well served with rsync or restic (both choices should be orthogonal to using rsync).
> Are there compatibility issues between ZFS on Linux and ZFS on FreeNAS that I need to be concerned about?
The world is divided in Oracle and not-Oracle - AFAIK there shouldn't be major differences between those two - that I believe now both follow upstream zfsonlinux.
However - I believe rsync.net still doesn't support zfsonlinux/openzfs encryption (zfsonlinux 0.8+). While locally it's possible to encrypt the disk "under" zfs... Native encryption is tempting.
And you would of course never send anyone data without encrypting it?
A fair number of the ZoL 0.8 features (encryption, allocation classes being two prominent examples) are not available currently for FreeBSD
I tried to directly import the Linux created pools into freenas, but they are read only due to a feature property that’s only supported by ZoL.
In read only mode I sent everything to the backup Linux server, destroyed the main pool and sent the whole thing back to the Freenas setup.
For now I'm just doing rsync of the snapshot directories, not upgrading the Ubuntu pool, and waiting on FreeNAS feature support to match.