Can one ZFS mirrored disk be used alone for recovery without FreeNAS

[nekenyu]

I am new to FreeNAS. I want a small home server for pictures and various files that just works and is easy to recover when it fails. I am looking at getting a FreeNAS Mini or XL.

If I use ZFS mirror for the disks, can any one of a set of ZFS mirror disks be read by itself from something other than a FreeNAS box for recovery purposes? I don't expect Windows to read it, but maybe a FreeBSD VM.

It would be nice to know that I can recover without FreeNAS hardware, for example when it just won't boot up and I don't have time to play (like the old home server this past weekend).

 

[danb35]

If I use ZFS mirror for the disks, can any one of a set of ZFS mirror disks be read by itself from something other than a FreeNAS box for recovery purposes?

If you have a two-disk mirror, yes, you should be able to import either disk as a degraded pool in any OS that supports OpenZFS with the appropriate feature flags. FreeBSD would be the most straightforward, but Illumos, Linux, or MacOS should also work.