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Creating Redundant Copies Of Critical (To Keep Forever) Data

Note: For a fantastic in depth insight into the zfs copies details
  See: http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/zfs_copies_and_data_protection
 
So ... onwards...

We all have pictures... and they are typically spinning on a single, at risk, hard drive. When it dies, there will be a disaster...

So to avoid that doomsday I've been looking at storing my picture archive on a ZFS/Nevada server (home Ultra 40).

Here's the steps I followed after having already established my basic zfs pool.

booter# zfs create tank/backup/pictures
booter# zfs set mountpoint=/export/backup/pictures tank/backup/pictures
booter# zfs set sharenfs=rw tank/backup/pictures
booter# zfs share -a

Also I decided (for extra insurance) to set the number of copies (for metadata and data) via the following commands

booter# zfs set copies=2 tank/backup/pictures
booter# zfs set compression=on tank/backup/pictures

booter# zfs get copies tank/backup/pictures
NAME                  PROPERTY  VALUE                 SOURCE
tank/backup/pictures  copies    2                     local

I'm still evaluating many angles of this promising critical (at least to me) data container setup. I will say more later on this topic. Clearly I still need to purchase 2 or more disks and add them into my storage pool, but I hope to do that next week.

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