ZFS Replication as Full Live backup

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

Hello everyone,
i have play a little with ZFS replication, and i’m a little skeptic about the benefits.

Of course we can see the benefits of a snapshot, when we can revert back to a point of time. Having said that, doing ZFS replication on another server, seems useless because we can replicate in same host / different pool, or even same host / same pool / different dataset !

What i was really looking forward is to have really duplicated data on a physically different server. So i have setup a ZFS Replication to another server following tutorials and manual. While everything is ok, i created a share on the second server where the ZFS replication send to. I can say the data was there, but some files are not opening correctly with error of corruption, can’t find file etc…

To my understanding ZFS Replication is a way to revert back to a state through the snapshots, but data is not readily available to the second server. My target is to full data duplicate 100%. Do i miss something ? Is there any other method to achieve this through ZFS replication ?

Thank you.

2

During replication, ZFS does not do a byte-for-byte copy but instead converts a snapshot into a stream of data. This design means that the ZFS pool on the receiving end does not need to be identical and can use a different RAIDZ level, pool size, or compression settings, so yes ZFS will duplicate the data to another server that does not have to be the same. I am not sure why you have data issues, I have setup and used ZFS replications in a lot of environments with out issue. https://youtu.be/et7JyacV_hA