ZFS Send and Receive: Replicating Your Data Hoard Without rsync
If you’re already on ZFS, whether that’s TrueNAS, a Proxmox host, or a DIY OpenZFS box, the obvious tool for moving a data hoard to a second machine is rsync. It works, but it has a cost that gets worse as the hoard grows: every run has to walk the entire directory tree, stat every file, and figure out what changed before it transfers a single byte. On a pool with a few hundred thousand media files, that walk alone can take longer than the actual transfer. ZFS has a better answer built in, and it’s been there the whole time: zfs send and zfs receive. ...