continuous 1:1 backup from NVME to SSD

[qhash]

I have a small N305 device that I want to install proxmox on and run some VMs (also a routing instance, i.e. OPNSense). My box has one x2 PCIE3.0 NVME port and a SATA port. I do not want to do ZFS RAID1 from them because of the drop in performance. Is there any way/tool to copy/backup the whole contents of the NVME drive to SATA SSD drive constantly so that in case NVME fails, I can reboot using SATA SSD?

 

[Johannes S]

There are several ways to do this, however none inside the GUI. The GUI has a replication feature with which you can replicate vm disks from a local zfs storage to a zfs storage on a different host. This uses zfs send/receive feature under the hood but doesn't work with different local disks.
But this feature of zfs could be used to achieve your usecase:
Setup zfs on both disks. Write yourself a shellscript, which syncs everything from the NVME to the SATA ssd. Afterwards setup a cron job or systemd timer to run this script on a fixed time schedule (e.G. every 15 minutes/hourly/daily/whatever).

Another option could be to use the native backup function of PVE to backup the VMs to the SATA ssd. In case of an NVME failure you would then restore the VMs from the backup and relaunch them. if you partition the SATA SSD that you have one partition for another install of PVE and another one for the data you should be able to have a minimal downtime.

In any case you should als have backups outside the N305, at least one offsite

 

[qhash]

Thanks. Guess I wont be able to write a scipt in the nearest future, so I will go with second option. Must investigate a backup of a complete network host config as well so that downtime is not long.