I used to use rsync to copy data from my storage array on one machine to an external and an off site backup. Since a lot of it was code, it always took forever to scan all the small files, and I had to script unlocking remote partitions.

With encrypted ZFS, I can just zfs snap then zfs send, and it does the same thing at the block level, raw, so way faster, less data transfer, and no need to send a key or passphrase unless I need to mount it at the destination (meaning a cloud provider could never know the data, for instance).

ZFS is also recursive, so if I have s/storage and /storage/stuff defined, I can snap and send either level, which makes it as versatile as rsync.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Oh interesting, i am not super familar with zfs' tools, so thats pretty cool! Ill have to look at that for my storage array.