I'll read some more but is there anything I can do about not having ECC ram? It's either have ECC or don't use FreeNAS?
No; and no but it's a non-null risk to lose all your data because of RAM errors, pretty rare but it has already happened to multiple members in the past. Personally I'd never use FreeNAS without ECC RAM but you can take the risk if you want, your data, your choice ;)
I planned to make backups on Amazon S3 & DVDs for critical photos etc if this makes it ok?
If you keep all your backups then yes but if you keep only the last backup then no because you'll probably have a corrupted backup because you'll have copied the corrupted data to the backup.
Crazy how that works. Never really had problems with non ECC before. But after reading that it doesn't sound like a risk, sounds more like insanity to want to go without ECC on ZFS... The part that was a deal breaker for me is corrupting backups & no recovery.
Because usually you don't even know the problem is because of RAM error(s). When you see Windows BSOD you just think "well, it's Windows, nothing new here..." or when you hear a glitch in your musics or see a glitch in your movies you think it's here from the first time you had the file and you don't care much about it, etc...
If you keep multiple backups then it should be ok in case the last one(s) is(are) corrupted you can still recover your data from an older backup.
ill be sure to match 1 TB hd to 1 GB ram.
Don't be too concerned about that, it's a flexible rule, you can have 20 TB of data with 8 GB of RAM without any problems for example (NB: if you use Plex then you really should have 16 GB of RAM minimum) so use it as a guideline but not a hard rule :)
