• 1 Post
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2025

help-circle









  • For your situation I would be more likely to go with a single drive with btrfs and dup for metadata redundancy. Regular snapshots and scrubs.

    Use a second drive in the same system with btrfs to store snapshots at wider scheduled intervals. These will be bigger since no CoW on the separate file system. Scheduled scrub here too.

    Use a third drive with ext4 as a backup target using a separate backup mechanism.

    Use the fourth drive as a spare, or in a separate location as a target to send the backups if you don’t already have an off-site solution.




  • What are you saving on that drive? Many data file formats already have compression of their own and don’t benefit much from file system compression. So if this is for media files, for example, it’s likely to add CPU overhead without a big benefit in transfer speed.

    ZFS is not installed by default with most Linux distributions due to its license. It’s something you install after the os. Btrfs should work, but I see some discussion online of 128 or 256MB minimum volume size.