Command Center

For many people who use a computer, knowing where to store growing amounts of data can become tricky.

You start off with one disk, run out of space, buy a bigger one etc. And if you have a camcorder you’ll be generating gigabytes of data for every Mini DV tape you record. Also, you may have a digital video recorder attached to your TV and wish to permanently keep some of the programmes/films you’ve recorded. Now you’re talking hundreds of gigabytes, if not terabytes of storage that are required to handle all this data.

And then there’s the problem of backups… oh boy, this will be a fun project



Here’s a series of articles that tackle this tricky subject, where I describe the choices I made, the problems encountered and the solutions found during my quest to build my own ZFS home fileserver, or ZFS home NAS box (network attached storage).

1. Home Fileserver: What do I need?
2. Home Fileserver: Existing products
3. Home Fileserver: I’ll use ZFS
4. Home Fileserver: ZFS hardware
5. Home Fileserver: ZFS setup
6. Home Fileserver: Backups
7. Home Fileserver: Suspend
8. Home Fileserver: Trunking
9. Home Fileserver: ZFS snapshots
10. Home Fileserver: Backups from ZFS snapshots
11. Home Fileserver: Drive temps
12. Home Fileserver: RAIDZ expansion
13. Home Fileserver: Active Directory Integration
14. Home Fileserver: A Year in ZFS
15. Home Fileserver: ZFS File Systems
16. Home Fileserver: OpenSolaris 2009.06
17. Home Fileserver: Media Center
18. Home Fileserver: Mirrored SSD ZFS root boot
19. Home Fileserver: ZFS boot pool recovery
20. Home Fileserver: Handling pool errors