And FreeBSD comes with native ZFS. MORE, it snapshots your OS before updates/upgrades, so you never ever screw up any upgrade.

Thanks for the second link - looks interesting.

I have an old and loud 16-bay server that boots every 7 days or so if no one is home, `syncoid there here`, and shuts off. I'll get pinged by uptimerobot once in a while if it's overdue and I'll get a notification if a pool is unhealthy or reaching capacity (`sanoid --health` I think). Otherwise I forget I even have it set up.

Automated cold backups are great peace-of-mind.

I like to use ZFS snapshots of running systems and then create and upload the backup from them via the excellent Borgmatic. (I know you can't depend on snapshots for databases and similar, but it's worked until now™.)

Using this in production for 5 years now. We have a replicated MongoDB and one replica lives on a ZFS doing snapshot backups via syncoid. Love it.

Agree!