Episode Details

Daniel learned the hard way that a silently degrading ZFS pool can fill your backups with corruption for weeks before you notice. This episode breaks down the pre-backup health check workflow: using zpool status and scrub results to gate backups, the difference between ZFS checksums and SMART monitoring, notification systems that actually get your attention (from Pushover to PagerDuty), and the uncomfortable question of whether to pull the plug immediately if you're running without RAID. We explore the tooling landscape — zed, Sanoid, Syncoid — and why the ZFS ecosystem expects you to wire up your own safety nets.