I've been running 10+ LVM volumes on top of dmcrypt on top of md RAID1 on
Debian for many, many years and it has served me well. I've been
double-mirroring (i.e. three active drives in the RAID array) for the last
several with the idea that I can manually fail a disk, pull it out (and
replace with a fresh drive), and put it somewhere safe off-site as an easy
approach to backup (and I'm only concerned with disaster recovery, not
individual file recovery).
I have new server hardware I'm planning on moving things to, and I'm
considering making a change to my approach. I've been hearing good things
about ZFS for a long time, and I understand that encryption has been
supported for several years. Assuming that I have three physical disks to
dedicate (separate from the three I am currently using) I'm seeking
guidance on the following:
1. Can an entire ZFS array be encrypted, rather than individual volumes? I
don't want to have to enter the password for each volume, just once
when
bringing up the whole array.
2. Is there a way to tune ZFS such that it can tolerate the loss of any two
out of three disks? Redundancy is more important to me than total
available storage.
3. Is there any equivalent off-site backup mechanism like my current
fail-and-remove approach?
Note that I am not worried about the effort involved in moving data. This
is a home setup and downtime is tolerable.
Thanks,
--Gregory
