This is getting lots of upvotes and rightfully so. I think people would love more posts about FreeBSD: especially about ZFS and bhyve (the FreeBSD hypervisor).
It's a bit sad that this Lenovo ThinkCentre ain't using ECC. I use and know ZFS is good but I'd prefer to run it on a machine supporting ECC.
I never tried FreeBSD but I'm reading more and more about it and it looks like although FreeBSD has always had its regular users, there are now quite some people curious about trying it out. For a variety of reasons. The possibility of having ZFS by default and an hypervisor without systemd is a big one for me (I run Proxmox so I'm halfway there but bhyve looks like it'd allow me to be completely systemd free).
I'm running systemd-free VMs and systemd-free containers (long live non-systemd PID ones) so bhyve looks like it could the final piece of the puzzle to be free of Microsoft/Poettering's systemd.
It lets you patch/upgrade an isolated environment without touching the running bits, reboot into that environment, and if things aren't working well boot back into the last known-good one.
Boot environments are awesome but it’s worth reading up on what is _not_ included in the snapshot. It’s really only the ”base system” and a rollback will keep whatever is in /var, /home and many other directories, so it’s good to know what to expect.
I use ZFSBootMenu with Linux and in that setup, the entire root dataset is in the snapshot, so it’s a ”complete” restore.
Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year?
I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping up more and more but I just can't see the benefits for occasional use.
> It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...?
It depends on whether you’re interested in it or not. There are multiple benefits with ZFS over your current setup, such as snapshotting, compression and the fact that it’s a virtual volume manager similar to LVM, ie more control over the things I just mentioned on a subset of the storage.
I also avoid hardware raid controllers like the plague for the simple reason that you are then ”vendor locked”, which you wouldn’t be with ZFS, you could easily move the disk(s) to another chassi.
Its not a replacement for a physically seperate backup, so putting stuff in the cloud is good (though I'm sure it will get expensive, depending on how much you store).
I use SnapRAID for replication personally, because I like the flexibility it gives in terms of drives that make up the array, I like that it does not work the drives too hard, I like that I can drop drives in over time (to try and lessen coinciding failures) and I like that it works on top of a normal file/folder hierarchy on normal partitions (so I can access the files without SnapRAID should I need to). The cost is that I can lose up to the last day's worth of files (because the parity file is only updated nightly).
I’m primarily a ZFS-on-FreeBSD kind of guy but I repeatedly had need of doing ZFS-on-Linux recently and after a couple of times wrote it up for others. There are a lot of these guides, the difference is that this one tries to be idiomatic, using “native” tooling (eg systemd, love it or hate it) to do the job as “correctly” on Linux as possible:
It seems weird in 2025/2026 we are still discussing the baseline of getting a storage working.
Feels we’re spending too much time discussing the trees and not enough time getting the forest going:
* we need reliable local storage
* integrated backup
* apps installation / management
* remote access and account management
* app isolation, reliable updates
I've run my own Home NAS on ZFS for 4 years or so. In the end I ended up with majority NVMe setup with long-term archival storage on HDDs. This made my NAS much more useful / ergonomic since I can search, move files at 10Gbps speeds. I really hated the pause when opening up directories, etc. Details here:
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 31.1 ms ] threadIt's a bit sad that this Lenovo ThinkCentre ain't using ECC. I use and know ZFS is good but I'd prefer to run it on a machine supporting ECC.
I never tried FreeBSD but I'm reading more and more about it and it looks like although FreeBSD has always had its regular users, there are now quite some people curious about trying it out. For a variety of reasons. The possibility of having ZFS by default and an hypervisor without systemd is a big one for me (I run Proxmox so I'm halfway there but bhyve looks like it'd allow me to be completely systemd free).
I'm running systemd-free VMs and systemd-free containers (long live non-systemd PID ones) so bhyve looks like it could the final piece of the puzzle to be free of Microsoft/Poettering's systemd.
* https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments...
* https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl
* https://dan.langille.org/category/open-source/freebsd/bectl/
* https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/zfs-boot-environme...
It lets you patch/upgrade an isolated environment without touching the running bits, reboot into that environment, and if things aren't working well boot back into the last known-good one.
I use ZFSBootMenu with Linux and in that setup, the entire root dataset is in the snapshot, so it’s a ”complete” restore.
I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping up more and more but I just can't see the benefits for occasional use.
It depends on whether you’re interested in it or not. There are multiple benefits with ZFS over your current setup, such as snapshotting, compression and the fact that it’s a virtual volume manager similar to LVM, ie more control over the things I just mentioned on a subset of the storage.
I also avoid hardware raid controllers like the plague for the simple reason that you are then ”vendor locked”, which you wouldn’t be with ZFS, you could easily move the disk(s) to another chassi.
I use SnapRAID for replication personally, because I like the flexibility it gives in terms of drives that make up the array, I like that it does not work the drives too hard, I like that I can drop drives in over time (to try and lessen coinciding failures) and I like that it works on top of a normal file/folder hierarchy on normal partitions (so I can access the files without SnapRAID should I need to). The cost is that I can lose up to the last day's worth of files (because the parity file is only updated nightly).
https://neosmart.net/blog/zfs-on-linux-quickstart-cheat-shee...
It seems weird in 2025/2026 we are still discussing the baseline of getting a storage working.
Feels we’re spending too much time discussing the trees and not enough time getting the forest going: * we need reliable local storage * integrated backup * apps installation / management * remote access and account management * app isolation, reliable updates
https://benhouston3d.com/blog/home-network-lessons
For anyone reading in the future: ZFS is better for multi-disk setups. Btrfs for e.g laptop etc.
Fedora and Arch use btrfs by default now if I remember correctly.