Re: ZFS, longterm archive of data and Debian
Nick Lidakis wrote:
> I have been Googling for the last week on file systems like ZFS and the
> best way to store and preserve data that needs to be read on a regular
> basis. I've read many conflicting opinions, in particular about ZFS, and
> was hoping to get some opinions on this list.
>
> Like many music lovers I've ditched the CD player and have a Debian based
> music server that fetches music from a big hard drive on my desktop box
> via NFS. Most of my music is ripped from my personal collection of CDs
> I've amassed over the years. But I've been purchasing quite a few high
> resolution titles from online sources such as HDTracks and Channel
> Classics.
>
> I'm trying to think of the best way to preserve the integrity of these
> music files over the long term. I've read good things about FreeNAS and
> its ZFS implementation but that would require assembling a separate
> machine. The conflicting reports regard CPU power and the amount of RAM
> one needs to run ZFS, e.g., 1GB per TB of disk space.
I'm running ZFS within a virtual machine on an E450 (AMD 2x1,65GHz).
You need a lot of RAM and high CPU power if you use the block-deduplication.
But I would assume block-deduplication will not have any benefit for music or videos.
The online-compression didn't need much RAM but CPU power.
Like deduplication I would assume compression will not have any benefit for you.
ZFS will calculate checksums over the files and can verify this by scrubbing
the device. This will help you only if you have configured a zraid or a mirror.
>
> With one user reading one FLAC file at a time from a machine running ZFS
> does one need a modern CPU and gobs of RAM? I understand ECC RAM and a 64
> bit OS is recommended.
No. You have to export the ZFS filesystem with NFS or SMB to access it
from another machine. The client will only read the data from network.
All work have to be done by the server.
The server must have a 64bit OS. 32bit isn't supported.
ECC RAM isn't necessary. Do you know what the benefit of ECC?
>
> Can my desktop run ZFS on the discs with the music files and use a
> separate disk with ext3 for my daily tasks? If yes, should I run 64bit
> Debian or just use lots of RAM and PAE?
ZFS is only a filesystem. So, as other filesystems too, you can have different
partitions with differents filesystems.
As mentioned above, you need a 64bit non-windows OS.
>
> Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
A Backup inherit the risk to backup a corrupt file and destroy the correct file
within your backup. So you need a very intelligent backup solution and a lot
of time to find the last correct file to restore.
So I would beliefe the best solution for you is either linux software raid or
ZFS. Both can verify your data and restore the correct data from the parity/redundancy.
--
Don't Panic
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