Hi -- I'm trying to get my head around ZFS after getting annoyed at the poor performance (and data loss) of a pair of exFAT drives and wanting something more robust, high-performance and x-platform compatible than HFS+. I think what I'm trying to achieve is quite simple, but most of the tutorials I've found assume that I want to migrate my entire system on to ZFS and I'm just not there yet.
So I have a pair of Seagate 4TB that I want to to be able to use with either of my two Macs (both running Mojave with all updates) in what I'll call an 'incremental clone' configuration (distinguishing this from mirrored for reasons that will become clear). Let's call them Drive 1 and Drive 2.
Drive 1 is the 'master' containing well over 10 years' worth of digital photography (> 1.25TB in a mix of CaptureOne, iPhoto/Photos, and Aperture packages -- those blessed/cursed folders). Reads from/writes to any of the packages are (presumably) made directly from the OS X application since the ZFS drive will now (thanks to OpenZFS) look like any other.
Drive 2 is my off-site backup drive that should faithfully (and, ideally, quickly) clone any changes made to Drive 1 since the last time it was connected and, space permitting, keep a snapshot of what was deleted for some period of time. So obviously Drive 1 will be repeatedly used/updated while Drive 2 is not connected so this doesn't work as a 'normal' mirroring.
There are several aspects of setup and configuration that confuse me:
1. It looks like I need not only to wipe the drives (obvs) but also to do something along the lines of https://openzfsonosx.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3192#p8981 to ensure that the drive doesn't get remounted by OSX as exFAT or something else and destroy my backup drives completely? But is that enough? The solutions that many of you seem to have used on the forums are much more aggressive than this and involve working around SIP (https://openzfsonosx.org/wiki/Suppressing_the_annoying_pop-up), but that approach seems to be mainly for use with internal and partitioned drives, not a standalone external. So is that all still necessary?
2. It seems to me that using the built-in compression of ZFS (lz4) will benefit me if used with both HDs not only for reads/writes while working with Disk 1, but obviously for backing up from Disk 1 to Disk 2.
3. There's also a bit on the forums about the importance of block size to performance when setting up the drive but I can't see much about how to figure out from command line what my particular situation is. I can look up the model numbers but am not sure what I'm looking for...
4. I don't think that for my purposes I actually need to set up any pools/tanks, so the only other thing is to enable the snapshotting on Drive 2 (or is this a command that I need to manually/cron run periodically?).
I assume that I would then just use ChronoSync (which I usually use to sync files) is the way to actually incrementally update Drive 2 since it won't care what the FS is if it can read the source and destination drives but it should all work faster thanks to ZFS performance and compression; however, I'd be interested to hear if there are other tricks that might speed up the incremental cloning process (rsync an obvious option but not my first choice).
Thank you!