# Raspberry Pi as off-site ZFS backup



## yourlord (Sep 7, 2015)

My primary server OS install (FreeBSD 10.1) and all my data which is hosted under it reside on 2 ZFS pools. For backups I currently zfs send incremental snapshots of all the datasets over the network to a ZFS formatted external USB drive attached to a Linux machine with ZFS on Linux installed. 

It works like a champ, but all this data is still here in the same building, which makes it vulnerable. I want to deploy an extremely low power backup solution to an off-site location where I can script it to periodically receive incrementals via SSH to another ZFS formatted USB attached drive. I have a spare Raspberry Pi, which I know is pretty weak CPU wise and only has 512MB of memory but this device has to do nothing else but receive and store data and every few weeks run a scrub. This isn't an application where I need read performance at all so I can essentially squish the ARC down as small as it can go and not care.

I installed the FreeBSD 10.2 image for the Raspberry Pi model B and it boots up fine, but it appears ZFS support isn't available. 

Has anyone else accomplished something like this? I don't really want to invest the time needed to hack together something totally custom here. If it's too much trouble to do with FreeBSD I'd probably either just deploy Linux on the Pi and try to get ZFS on Linux working there, or if that is too much of a pain even throw an old PC at the remote site for this. I'd really prefer to have something like a Pi doing this because this device is going to spend 95% of it's life idle and I'd rather use a device that idles at very low power.

Thanks for reading!


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## ANOKNUSA (Sep 7, 2015)

yourlord said:


> I installed the FreeBSD 10.2 image for the Raspberry Pi model B and it boots up fine, but it appears ZFS support isn't available.



If anyone ever manages to get ZFS working reliably and practically on a Raspberry Pi, I'll eat my hat.  Your best bet is to dump the filesystems with `zfs send` and store them on any OS with any filesystem.


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