[NCLUG] zfs (my hard drive crashed, time to upgrade the fs?)

[John Gilmore]

Due to a hard drive failure, I'm planning on upgrading to encrypted
ZFS. I was running Debian Squeeze, which doesn't support zfs, so I
upgraded to Wheezy. Which I know is a bad idea with one drive already
dead, I should have liked to have waited till after I had functional
backups again, but didn't see a way to upgrade to ZFS w/o first
upgrading to wheezy.

The setup I had:

hda seagate 2Tb
  500mb /boot (ext3)
  remainder LUKS / (ext3)
hdb Western Digital 2Tb (predictably, this is the one that failed,
though it's newer)
  LUKS /var/backups (ext3)

So my tentative plan:
 Upgrade to wheezy (DONE)
 Install debian-zfs (DONE)
 buy new hard drive (OOPS! Got a 1TB drive instead)
 create new zpool w/ new HD and false 2TB sparse file


One of my two 2Tb hard drives failed its SMART tests this last
weekend. Fortuneately, it was the backup hard drive, and the only
thing on it is snapshots (made w/ rsync via yarbu) of the first hard
drive (and the other computers on my LAN as well)

So I bought a new hard drive, but I or