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Comment by Helmut10001 | Hacker News Reader

I really like ZFS snapshots with offsite pull-mode sync using Jim Salter's sanoid/syncoid [1]. ZFS is the base for all OS/filesystems on top of it. If you have a good system for organizing ZFS datasets, and separating ephemeral from persistent data (e.g. [2]), then this is 90% of the backup requirements already fullfilled.

    [1]: https://github.com/jimsalterjrs/sanoid
    [2]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2026-05-16_rootless_docker_virtiofs_proxmox/

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Thanks for the second link - looks interesting.

I have an old and loud 16-bay server that boots every 7 days or so if no one is home, `syncoid there here`, and shuts off. I'll get pinged by uptimerobot once in a while if it's overdue and I'll get a notification if a pool is unhealthy or reaching capacity (`sanoid --health` I think). Otherwise I forget I even have it set up.

Automated cold backups are great peace-of-mind.

Exactly! My offsite Backup box boots using a Shelly Plug S set on timer; it doesn't need to unlock the enrypted ZFS datasets because I use zfs sync snapshots in raw mode (-R). After the zfs scrupt, the box sends an email to me and shuts down. Next week: Repeat.

I like to use ZFS snapshots of running systems and then create and upload the backup from them via the excellent Borgmatic. (I know you can't depend on snapshots for databases and similar, but it's worked until now™.)

Using this in production for 5 years now. We have a replicated MongoDB and one replica lives on a ZFS doing snapshot backups via syncoid. Love it.

And FreeBSD comes with native ZFS. MORE, it snapshots your OS before updates/upgrades, so you never ever screw up any upgrade.

It's not native ZFS. They threw the native port away and replaced it with ZoL.

Agree!

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