Backups

Two years ago, a friend and I backed each other up through a TrueNAS VM on an iSCSI zvol. Now that I run NixOS, I replaced that machinery with zfs-tenant: OpenZFS delegation and a quota keep him inside one dataset, and a small SSH forced command plus zfs zone make sure he sees nothing else of my pool. His keys never leave his house, and a VM test checks each of those claims.

After replacing Proxmox and TrueNAS with NixOS, my GPU machine was the last one still on btrfs, picked years ago because forum threads had me convinced that ZFS and NixOS were a bad combination. What finally pushed me to fix it: I run AI agents in YOLO mode all day, the stories about frontier models wiping home directories kept coming, and my restic backups needed an hour and a half just to scan a hundred million files. The audit’s first finding: the backups had been silently dead for four months. This is the story of auditing my backups, verifying the restore path end-to-end, and wiping my daily driver so that nine machines share the exact same ZFS setup.

🎄🎁 Advent of Open Source – Day 03/24: Rebuilding a popular backup tool in Python for better reliability and cross-platform compatibility.

How to create a secure, decentralized backup system using TrueNAS and ZFS replication. This guide shows you how to partner with a friend for mutual backups, leveraging the power of ZFS while maintaining network isolation and data privacy.