Glad it was helpful!

Each has their pros and cons certainly. TrueNAS has taken a leap forward in recent versions, is rock-solid running on FreeBSD. One consideration is UnRaid is not free. A third option I suggest you look at if VMs and Docker containers are important is Proxmox. Has a lot of great features, and is a full blown hyperconverged platform 👍

I dont think you'd be able to do a complex search like that, but you could search fro dataset name, then in those results sort by date.

That’s a great question, and I will run through that scenario in my lab. Thanks for bringing it up!

Thanks for the kind words! Professionally I am an Infrastructure Architect, and have been working in IT for a little over 20 years. I specialize in virtualization, integrations during merger & acquisitions, all things enterprise IT related. I thought it would be fun to share some of my tech-related hobbies on KZfaq, and hoped someone could learn a thing or two! I am constantly learning, so it’s my way of giving back

Yes, absolutely! The key to understand is how ZFS filesystem works: At its' core, in a very simplified way of describing it, you have your actual data, then you have metadata. A ZFS snapshot is effectively instructions on what that filesystem looked like at that point in time. When you delete a file for example, it does not "really" get deleted. It gets "marked as deleted" in the filesystem. Understanding that logic, you can see that ZFS snapshots make recovering data from a previous snapshot very simple: You mount the snapshot, which is a divergence in your filesystem from that point in time, recover the files you need, then remove that mount, and you're back in business. VERY efficient! With a traditional file-level or block-level backup, you must actually capture and store those files at that point in time, and incur the storage to retain them. True, you can do incremental or delta backups, but you're still "paying" to store those files a second time, in the form of backups. Now, ZFS snapshots are not "free" storage either, and snapshots that only ever exist on your primary TrueNAS server are really NOT backups by themselves. From here, you need to ship those snapshots off to another TrueNAS server, preferably in a different physical location. For more on that, I recommend checking out a video I made for exactly that. You can do all this in a lab to simulate it, and learn how it works! kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rM1jqqqpvNLVoqM.html

@@OMGTheCloud does this mean that when you mount the snapshot with the intention of recovering whatever files got lost or corrupted you are not taking double the disk space? I guess mounting a 500GB snapshot just to recover a few files is very inefficient. It can't work like that I guess.. ?

@@00messenjah Good question! Thanks so the ZFS filesystem, this is not the case: Snapshots are effectively instructions on how the underlying filesystem looks. When you mount a snapshot, only the difference between the original data and the snapshot are consumed as additional disk space. Another way to think of it is this: When you delete a file, you are not "really" deleting it. ZFS marks that file as deleted, and you appear to get that free space back, but it's still on the disk and recoverable, as long as there's enough free space on the volume that it doesnt have to be overwritten (and a snapshot isnt still referencing it). When you mount the snapshot, you're telling ZFS "hey, show me the filesystem as it appeared at this point in time".