As soon as I posted my last article, I realized how completely insane my backup system is, and sought to simplify it. Let’s start with the biggest problem: 4x1TB disks in a single pool with no mirroring. This means 4x as likely to have a drive failure, and when I did, it would have been catastrophic. Furthermore, it was obvious that I didn’t place much confidence in ZFS, since all the data in that pool was being copied to a single bare drive. Insanity.

So I have gone back and refactored the whole shebang. Those 4x1TB disks are part of a 2TB ZFS pool, with the other 2TB as a full mirror. If any disk fails, replacing it is simple and no data is lost. Over time, I hope to be able to replace each of them with a 2TB disk (4x2TB = 8TB total, 4TB mirrored available).

The ZFS pool is divided into a few filesystems. First, the largest portion is dedicated to /home which is still kept rsynced with the Mac. But there’s also a local /mnt/zpool/backup that the rest of the Linux system is backed up to with 30 days of rotation. And 500GB set aside for an AFP share for Time Machine to use over the wireless.

That’s all. I trust the ZFS way more than I trust the disks not to fail, and when they do, I won’t be panicking. Time Machine works flawlessly, and whether I login as a local user on the Mac or in Linux, the same set of user data is available in ~.