LVM-Thin vs. ZFS for Snapshots and resizing

smoochy

New Member
Sep 6, 2024
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Hello Proxmox community,

I have been using two individual Raspis up to now to use Home Assistant and eBlocker. However, I wanted to move them to a single device. I also wanted a temporary network storage where my SABnzbd downloads are stored before I remove them from there and put them on the NAS. I would do this either via my Mac or Windows computer. I rarely have the NAS on for reasons of electricity costs.
And so I ended up with a Beelink Ser5 Pro with 32GB Ram and 1TB NVME SSD (Crucial CT1000P3PSSD8) and Proxmox. Probably completely oversized at the moment, but you never know what will happen.

Even though I'm not currently doing this with HA on the Raspi, I would like to back up the HA environment at regular intervals. Of course, I don't always want to shut down the HA instance, pull the backup and then start it again. I therefore assumed that the snapshot function would be practical for this. This has LVM-Thin or ZFS as a prerequisite.

By default, Proxmox installs ext4 as the file system. And I can't select ZFS during the installation because I would need 2 disks. And with a single NVME SSD, I didn't know how I could still provide LVM-Thin on an ext4 basis in order to store the individual containers on it.

So I got myself a SATA SSD (Crucial MX500 - CT500MX500SSD1) and have now installed Proxmox on it for the time being. It runs on ext4.

I have deleted the internal NVME SSD and reinitialized it with GPT. And now I'm faced with the question of whether to use LVM-Thin or ZFS on the NVME. I've already read that ZFS is more powerful, but has a lot of functions that I probably won't need as a private home user. I don't need logging etc. Likewise, the NVME SSD should of course last as long as possible (I had also read this as a disadvantage of ZFS - wear and tear). Why I don't use LVM-Thin without asking has the following background:

When I only had the NVME SSD formatted as ext4 available, I had done some testing.

SABnzbd is supposed to download its stuff to the NVME SSD and then sometime later I pack the stuff onto the NAS via Mac or Windows computer. So I have to be able to distribute the downloaded stuff via Samba in the network. I read up on this and followed this guide. It worked, with the Turnkey File Server I could reach the share in the network. I had given the Turnkey FS container a size of 500GB for testing.

With a little fiddling - a combination of this guide and this guide (making the storage available from the turnkey container to the SABnzbd container) - I was then able to get SABnzbd to load its downloads on the share . I still got a message in SABnzbd that it supposedly could not save file names with special characters or umlauts on this share, but I don't think that will be a problem.

I then downloaded something 50GB in size as a test and could see in the memory utilization of the Turnkey FS container that 50GB of 500GB had been used. However, it remained at this 50GB, even after I had deleted the items from the share and emptied the recycle bin.

Now my question is whether this behavior was due to the ext4 substructure? If the Turnkey FS container is now on LVM-Thin, would the storage utilization decrease again when I delete files from the share?

My desired use case would be:
- I can set the container size of Turnkey to 900GB. But that only as much memory is used by the container as is actually on the share. And when I delete things, this is reduced again.
- I would then take snapshots or backups of the entire HomeAssistant container at irregular intervals without restarting the container and back them up to the Nas at irregular intervals. And back up the configuration of the SABnzbd, Turnkey FileServer and eBlocker container at least once.

Would this be feasible?

Many thanks for your help.
 

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