[SOLVED] Why zfs as datastore for pbs?

[abma]

For me it seems there are few reasons when zfs should be used as datastore for pbs:

pbs does:
- verification
- deduplication
- compression

So, whats the benefit of using zfs as datastore for pbs? IMHO it just makes things slower. The only reason for using ZFS is when you use multiple disks / devices for one pool, or did i miss something?

 

[Dunuin]

So, whats the benefit of using zfs as datastore for pbs? IMHO it just makes things slower. The only reason for using ZFS is when you use multiple disks / devices for one pool, or did i miss something?

PBS also got synchronization so I guess you need no ZFS replication. And PBS got encryption so you don't need ZFS for that too. And you need no snapshots for ransomeware protection because you can setup rights so PVEs can only create/restore but not prune oder destroy backups.

But one advantage of ZFS could be to use "special devices" or L2ARC in case your are using HDDs for your datastore. In that case metadata could be stored on faster SSDs so doing a garbage collection might be faster because it doesn't need to load the metadata of millions of chunk-files from the slow HDDs.

 

[hvisage]

You mean other than a failed disk:
- ZFS proper redundancy: replace disk, datastore "intact"
- All other *filesystems*: restore datastore from elsewhere
- LVM/mdraid: okay, replace disk, filesystems on top ok
but now you need a separate filesystem on top, and you have two sets of components to admin

ZFS also makes (IMO) life easier when you need to do quotas for different datastores (ala Tuxis.nl 's selling backup storage space)

That said, during installation you can pick your filesystem/volume management poison yourself, ZFS is just one of those things that I've fall in love with how it saved my bacon several times

 

[abma]

Thanks for the replies!

As i'm using a single spinning disk as datastore i'll try ext4 next.

 

[ednt]

We use HP servers. So we build a RAID on controller basis, use ext4 as fs and use it as directory.
This results in much less RAM consumption and it is faster too. But we also use a remote PBS to sync this.