What Happened?

Long story short. A really bad misconfiguration.

I recently migrated all of my drives to ZFS due to it’s mirroring, compression and native encryption. Once I set it all up, I rebooted and had some problems problems with the DKMS package for ZFS failing to load… after fixing (had to rebuild kernel) that my ZFS pool wasn’t appearing.

So I tried some things like zpool import -a, no luck.. zpool import main? Nope. Eventually I ran zpool destroy main??? (so yeah, dont delete your data and you wont have problems XD). Anyways, at that point I had no other backups, and ended up losing all my data.

What are you doing now?

I’ve setup Borg Backup with the repo located on a separate drive and not in the ZFS pool. This is all I have for now until I setup an offsite solution aswell.

Backup Software and Resources

So you don’t make the same mistake. I advise you to backup any important documents and files you have in atleast one extra place.

Backup Software

  • Borg Backup - Archival backup with deduplication, compression and incremental!
  • Duplicity - rsync based incremental/versioned backups
  • bup - Git Packfile based backups, with deduplication and versioning

Offsite Storage Providers

  • Borg Base - Offsite Borg repo backup
  • Storj - Cheap, Distributed storage
  • Backblaze - Unlimited Backup for $6/Month
  • B2 - Backblaze pay as you go