rentar42

That's an extremely silly reason not to use a specific tool: Tool A provides an alternative way to do X, but I want to do X with some other tool B (that'll also work with tool A), so I won't be using tool A.

Send/receive may or may not be the right answer for backing up even on ZFS, depending on what exactly you want to achieve. It's really nice when it is what you want, but it's no panacea (and certainly no reason to avoid ZFS, since its use it 100% optional).

I just thought that if all storage can easily be "passed through" to a VM then it should in theory be very simple to boot the existing installation in a VM directly.

Regarding the extra storage: sharing disk space between proxmox and my current installation would imply that I have to pass-through "half of a drive" which I don't think works like that. Also, I'm using ZFS for my OS disk and I don't feel comformtable trying to figure out if I can easily resize those partitions without breaking anything ;-)

These kinds of issues are what drove me to use RaidZ2 (I went over board with using 6-disks): When during resilvering after a broken disk a second disk fails, it'll still keep the data.

One thing that RAID doesn't do is verify the integrity of your data on read. In other words: if you have silent data corruption somewhere you won't notice.

For many use cases that's acceptable, since it doesn't handle often, but personally I don't like it for any kind or achival/backups. That's why I picked ZFS, which stores and verifies checksums even on non-mirrored/non-raid storage. I've added RaidZ2 (similar to RAID 5 with 2 parity disks) on top of it to be able to recover from checksum errors.

Can second Kopia! The deduplication works like a charm.

I've recently started using Immich (I previously used Google Photos). And since I've backed up a recent Google Takeout archive (unzipped), backing up all of my images in Immich added just a couple hundered megabytes (over ~200GB of images).

I'm personally using https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/ as the target, but any S3 compatible place and many other targets are possible as well.

Edit: also, don't discount paying for some cloud storage for backups entirely: I never wanted to do that since I wanted to host it myself, but there's multiple reasons to have one of your backup targets be a cloud storage (yes, I know I'm in the selfhosted community):

• it's definitely physically seperate
• most cloud storage has incredibly reliable storage (which is hard to replicate on most home-storage-budgets)
• the cost can be very low even compared to buying disks (I pay 20$/year for 1TB, which can hold all of my valuable data easily, obviously not my "bulk stuff").

Just throwing out an option, not saying it's the best:

If you are comfortable with Linux (or you want to be come intimately familiar with it), then you can just run your favorite distribution. Running a couple of docker containers can be done on anything easily.

What you're losing is usually the simple configuration GUI and some built-in features such as automatic backups. What you gain is absolute control over everything. That tradeoff is definitely not for everyone, but it's what I picked and I'm quite happy with it.

So theoretically if someone has alrady set up their NAS (custom Debian with ZFS root instead of TrueNAS, but shouldn't matter), it sounds like it should be relatively straightforward to migrate all of that into a Proxmox VM, by installing Proxmox "under it", right? Only thing I'd need right now is some SSD for Proxmox itself.

I agree with the learning curve (personally I found it worthwhile, but that's subjective).

But how does ZFS limit easy backup options? IMO it only adds options (like zfs send/receive) but any backup solution that works with any other file systems should work just as well with ZFS (potentially better since you can use snapshots to make sure any backup is internally consistent).

I'm almost entirely with you on this.

But the only thing causing mind on my doubt is how excessively impulsive and not-in-control-of-himself Enlo often seems. That's the only thing that makes "this is just a serious of very stupid decisions made in the heat of the moment" even somewhat plausible.

Good on you to finally get into it, I switched to something systematic only very recently myself (previously it was "copy important stuff to an external HDD whenever I think of it").

The one thing that I learned (luckily the easy-ish way) is: test your backup. Yes, it's annoying, but since you rarely (ideally never!) will need to restore the backup it's incredibly easy to think that everything in your system is working and it either never having worked properly or it somehow started failing at some point.

A backup solution that has never been tested via a full restore of at least something has to be assumed to be broken.

Which reminds me: I have to set up the cron job to periodically test a percentage of all backed up data.

I decided to use Kopia, btw, but can't really say if that's well-suited for your goals.

An important first step that you can do before any "real" selfhosting is to get your own domain that you control. That way you can more easily switch providers (or start selfhosting) later on without having to distribute the knowledge of your changed email address to all relevant contacts and services.

I'm still using Gmail (lazy and it works), but I've switched fully to using only email addresses on domains that I own.

I fully appreciate the desire for more civil discussion.

But please be aware that tone policing has been used as an offensive weapon against many marginalized groups: "We get that you want to fight for your rights, but could you please do that in the form of civil discourse?" That phrase is almost always heard when years of civil discourse lead nowhere.