The Best Introduction to ZFS…ever?
If you care about your data, you should care about filesystems (the operating system/software abstraction over your storage hardware). If you care about filesystems, you will end up at ZFS: the Zettabyte FileSystem.
It’s basically an incredible piece of technology that can do just about anything that you might need from a storage system: instant snapshots, cloning, “live streaming” of filesystem changes over SSH, bitrot/corruption prevention and fixing (with checksumming), plus all the mirroring and parity features you’d expect from RAID. And so, so, so, soooooooo much more.
Here’s the best way to get started: watch these two videos, in order, and then go play with a FreeBSD system: