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On 19/09/18 17:20, Richard Brown wrote: > > Once again, I thank you for your complete and educational reply. > Explaining and unpicking the way you do allows me to work through each > step and hopefully understand the process. Personally I've learnt everything because others were kind enough to give me not just the required steps but also the gotchas, tricks and reasons _why_ it's done that way, so it's pretty much my duty to do the same thing :] "Teach a man to fish" and all that. > And that is what I will do but can I ask you to unpick the zfs comment a > bit please? > > The reason I ask is because I am trying to build a family server. > Unfortunately, the server will also be my working computer until I can > find something else. There's no problem with that - in fact, now I've got rid of all my power-sucking big iron from the garage (boo hoo) my main workstation is easily the most powerful general purpose box left in the house and it's also got most of the bulk storage in unsurprisingly - it also runs 24/7 so it's a natural fit. Realistically most people are in the same situation if you think about it (aren't they?) so it makes perfect sense to use your only/best PC as the household server too. Added bonus: it runs linux which is a perfect fit for the job! > It has a 250gb ssd and 2 x 2tb disks. The idea is to use one for photos > and docs and share around the house. We have about 1tb of data and I was > going to use rsync to sync the two drives. > > Would zfs be a better way to go please? In your specific case as it happens a definite but qualified "yes". The catch being you'd be mad to implement something so significant without testing it out and learning at least the basics first - this is your real working server with the master copy of your real data on it after all. What if you mess it up accidentally 'cos you mistyped a zfs delete command? Do you have a separate complete backup of all the data on those 2 x 2Tb drives? Otherwise it's a moot point, you won't have anywhere to stash a copy of the data while you wipe both existing disks and rebuild them into a ZFS pool. But yeah, if you learn a bit of simple ZFS first it's basically the perfect fit for your single workstation/server + multidisk storage scenario. Ideally you'd have at least one more 2Tb disk and 16Gb RAM in the PC: ZFS RAM consumption can be savage. Less of a concern for you as you'd only be running the data disks as a zpool but I run my entire / filesystem on ZFS and 16Gb frankly isn't enough. https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/Ubuntu https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/wiki/FAQ#what-is-zfs-on-linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZFS I can definitely point you at loads of easy howtos and basics articles - let's not overthink this, at the functional level you can be up and running and playing with ZFS in a couple of minutes! Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq