Interesting off-site replication option

General Discussion
1

Courtesy of this video:

I became aware of https://zfs.rent, which are pretty much a hard drive colo operation–you buy a drive, ship it to them, and they put it in a bay in one of their servers, attached to a small VM. You pay them, currently, $10/mo for the drive bay,[1] VM, some bandwidth, etc. They don’t say anything about any start-up costs.

Install Ubuntu or Debian on the VM, create a pool (or import the pool that’s already on the disk you sent them), and you have a remote ZFS replication target.

No affiliation at all, not even (yet) as a customer, but thought it sounded interesting.

  1. It seems the price is set to increase to $20/mo beginning 1 August 2026, but you can buy up to three years at the current $10/mo price. ↩︎

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Is there a way to do a Replication Task to a commercial Cloud backup service?
2

Arguably the best zfs remote replication deal out there, as long as you can physically buy the drives to send them. :grinning_face:

I wonder how its secured, i.e. is this a TrueNAS / debian / whatever server on the internet or can they just expose a wireguard node and the VM sits behind it?

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…but only half as good as it was two days ago.

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4

Interesting idea - I have to ask (when I get a chance) if they support hot spares - since it customer HD - then customer responsibility to monitor the drives and replace them.

5

As I understand it, if you’re paying for more than one drive slot, they’re all allocated to the same VM. What you then do with them is up to you.

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