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Comment by antongribok | Hacker News Reader

If you are only using those two tools, then you only have a system for replication (and snapshots), but not a backup system.

If there is a data corruption bug in ZFS, it will propagate to your remote and corrupt data there.

I hope you have something else in place besides those two tools.

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Yes (although ZFS is pretty stable, it is always good to mention to not put all your eggs in a single basket).

My fallbacks are:

- an external drive that I connect once a year and just rsync-dump everything

- for important files, a separate box where I have borg/borgmatic [1] in deduplication mode installed; this is updated once in a while

Just curious: Do you have any reason to believe that such a data corruption bug is likely in ZFS? It seems like saying that ext4 could have a bug and you should also store stuff on NTFS, just in case (which I think does not make sense..).

[1]: https://github.com/borgmatic-collective/borgmatic

Good further comment on the subject [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/85aa7s/comment/dvw55u3...

It's funny that you link to a comment from 6 years ago. Just a month after that there was a pretty big bug in ZFS that corrupted data.

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/7401

Corresponding HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16797644

Yes, I read that. It is underpinning the 3-2-1 rule, 3 backups, on 2 different mediums (where zfs can be one of the two), one off-site.

I think it makes sense and thank you for the sensible reminder.

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