ZFS

It occurred to me that I am long past due for deploying an actual backup box for the lab. I have for years now relied either on a third party (S3), external HDDs, or my desktop (what else will I do with 20TB of ZFS?), to temporarily hold data before moving it back to what ever cluster or application I am going to redeploy. This mean I actually haven’t had a true reliable device dedicated to backups, ever. While my site here may not show it (yet), in the past year I have redeployed my lab four times so far. This is going from bare metal rke2, harvester, harvester (again), to Proxmox, and before that in the years prior the story was roughly the same. At this point I think I have the janky way of redeploying a cluster down to a science, but its time for that to change.

I recently discovered ZFS datasets are sent unencrypted by default and that they need to be sent with a flag to preserve their encrypted status. Well too late, I had already migrated my data, and deleted the old datasets by the time I had discovered this. After doing some research I found encrypting a dataset that is already created is not possible, so in order to fix this you need to send the unencrypted data set to an encrypted dataset.