The minimum amount of memory needed to use ZFS.

[andrew clarke]

On Wed 2015-12-23 21:43:37 UTC+1100, Stephen Hocking (stephen.hocking at gmail.com) wrote:

> Inspired by this article:
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/rsync-net-zfs-replication-to-the-cloud-is-finally-here-and-its-fast/
> 
> I am wondering about changing my offsite back strategy, which currently is
> made up of a Raspberry Pi with an external 3TB drive sitting at my
> brother's house, with periodic manual rsyncs. I'd like to change that to
> doing zfs replications.
> 
> I want to use some of my ARM based hardware as the target for the ZFS
> replication, owing to its low power usage. I have a few Cubiboxes floating
> around with around 2G of RAM, and a RPI2 or a Banana Pi with 1G. It'd have
> a UFS root on the SD card, and ZFS on the external drive.
> 
> Any ideas?

I'm curious about this too.

Currently I run a root-on-ZFS FreeBSD 10.2 amd64 system with 2 GB RAM
that I use for offline backups. The ZFS pool consists of 2 x 1 TB
drives in a mirror setup. I've never had FreeBSD run out of memory on
that machine.

I suggest you avoid using the deduplication feature of ZFS which from
what I understands likes to chew through memory.

I don't use ZFS snapshots on that machine, so can't speak about their
memory usage. Perhaps it's fairly insignificant, though.

An alternative might be to use something like rsnapshot, still on ZFS.

You might get a bigger audience if you ask on the freebsd-questions
list.

Regards
Andrew