32
Raidz2 or btrfs for important document storage? (piefed.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
35 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I currently have a secondary pool (with raidz2) that I was originally going to use for my important documents, such as storage for Paperless-ngx, as raidz offers corruption detection and repair. The pool is encrypted.

However, I'm concerned about rebuild times (it's a pool of 4 22TB drives). Is btrfs a better choice for this use case, or should I just go with raidz like I originally planned?

Edit: I should have mentioned that I already have 4-3-2 backups configured - I'm primarily interested in the "self-healing" aspect of ZFS so that I don't have to recover from backups unless necessary, and to resolve corruption on the fly without me having to notice that a file is corrupt.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] felbane@lemmy.world 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

RAID is not a backup.

RAID is not for data safety.

RAID is for:

  1. Ensuring availability of data in the face of hardware failure. That means your files don't disappear when a drive dies and you have some time to swap out for functional hardware and restore redundancy.
  2. Presenting multiple drives as one larger unit. This is what striping does, and to a lesser extent the parity-mode levels.
  3. Improving performance (sometimes). A RAID mirror is generally much faster to read from than any individual drive because reads can be interleaved across drive members. A stripe can be much faster because writes are distributed across drive members. This is less of a bonus today with solid state/nvme drives, but it's still applicable to spinning rust.

If your concern is protecting your data, set up a 3-2-1 backup strategy.

[-] CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I'm very aware and have full 4-3-2 backups already. I'm also not interested in a standard raid. Thanks though! It's always good to mention that raid is not a backup. I simply want to add more protection from disk corruption (not necessarily full failure) so that I don't need to recover from backups unless I absolutely must. A benefit would also be resolving corruption before I even notice it.

this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
32 points (94.4% liked)

Selfhosted

59492 readers
1115 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

  7. No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz