It's a pretty awesome series! Can't wait for the second season to come out!

@bertieb All my important data is on 2 external HDDs that I rotate out every couple of days. I need to ramp it up and get an off-site backup that's automated

But i'm only backing up important data, such as camera stuff or important documents. Everything else is either online already, or recreateable. Or, just not important

@bertieb I've abandoned RAID completely tbh, the potential rebuild times with 8TB disks pretty invites the next one to keel over and die while that runs

@bertieb that's what I did, went with expandability, so first a 6 disk ZFS array, then later a second one in the same case

bought the PSU to cater for that eventuality, and the main board can power the drives up sequentially so that cuts down on the surge

@bertieb shiver

@bertieb something to be said for coalescing, I don't even have to leave my chair to boot it up... especially great when I'm not at home and I want to pull something in :)

@bertieb :D

think the rebuild time would eventually be several days... nail biting event if you have to go through that

@MiG ah, 8TB... I shudder to think!

what puts me off zfs for BOSA (big ol' storage array) is the lack of expandability -- I I started off smaller with my 6x3TB (I think) raid6 and grown it over time as budget had permitted

I know there's a potential patch from Ahrens for ZFS for growing on the fly

but the ETA ??/202? bothers me

@CanadianLuke I'd love to have a proper external offline backup, and an offsite one too; but alas budget..

here's the WIP PR for expansion, which has context and related interesting links in the first comment!

@MiG yeah, that's pretty much my reaction any time I think about it or have to interact with it physically :D

@bertieb I think there's some code floating around, needs a while to be considered production safe though

@bertieb had the same dilemma, but for the reason above I HAD to abandon RAID... went with physical expansion, i.e. having space for a second array inside the same case

will be a while before I fill this one up, but when I do, I could temporarily remove one array, plug in much larger disks, copy the remaining existing array over, and then put the 2nd old array in its place... advantage being that I have a full fallback copy of the new array that way

it's not as pretty as expanding arrays, but it's workable