mick crane writes:
On 2021-01-24 17:37, Andrei POPESCU wrote:
[...]
If you want to combine Linux RAID and ZFS on just two drives you could partition the drives (e.g. two partitions on each drive), use the first partition on each drive for Linux RAID, install Debian (others will have to confirm whether the installer supports creating RAID from partitions) and then use the other partitions for the ZFS pool.
I can confirm that this works. In fact, I always thought that to be the "best practice" for MDADM: To use individual partitions rather than whole devices. OTOH for ZFS, best practice seems to be to use entire devices. I am not an expert on this, though :)
You might want to experiment with this in a VM first. For testing purposes you can also experiment with ZFS on files instead of real devices / partitions (probably with Linux RAID as well). Kind regards, AndreiThis is my problem "where is the OS to be running the ZFS to put Debian on ?"
You could use a live system, for instance. Beware that this route is complicated. I linked to the guide in a previous mail but am not sure if you were finally able to check it (you mentioned at least one of my links not being accessible, but not which one...).
All I want to do is back up PCs to another and have that have redundancy with 2 disks so if one gets borked I can still use the other and put things back together.How do I do that ?
My recommendation would be to keep it simple stupid: Let the installer setup RAID 1 MDADM for OS, swap and data and be done with it, avoid ZFS unless there is some reason to need it :)
For sure MDADM lacks the bit rot protection, but it is easier to setup especially for the OS and you can mitigate the bit rot (to some extent) by running periodic backup integrity checks which your software hopefully supports.
HTH Linux-Fan öö [...]
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