iconAnil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing

ZFS replication strategies with encryption

This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Becky Terefe-Zenebe. It is co-supervised with Mark Elvers.

We are using ZFS in much of our Planetary Computing infrastructure due to its ease of remote replication. Therefore, its performance characteristics when used as a local filesystem are particularly interesting. Some questions that we need to answer about our uses of ZFS are:

  1. We intend to have an encrypted remote backups in several locations, but only a few of those hosts should have keys and the rest should use raw ZFS send streams.
  1. We would typically have a snapshot schedule, such as hourly snapshots with a retention of 48 hours, daily snapshots with a retention of 14 days, and weekly snapshots with a retention of 8 weeks. As these snapshots build up over time, is there a performance degradation?
  1. How does ZFS send/receive compare to a peer-to-peer backup solution like Borg Backup, given that it gives a free choice of source and target backup file system and supports encryption?
# 1st Jun 2025 iconideas idea-beginner idea-ongoing storage systems urop zfs

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