Here’s some instructions on how I set up a zfs mirrored pool on Ubuntu 20.04. I made a similar post for zfs stripped mirror on Ubuntu server 14.04. Check out this post of you want to see that.


Install ZFS

The main components of ZFS are maintained as a standard Ubuntu package, so to install simply run:

$ sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

After that, we can check if ZFS was installed correctly by running:

$ whereis zfs


Create Storage Pool

First we need to choose which disks to pool. We can see what disks we have by running:

$ sudo fdisk -l

Write down the device names of the disks you want to pool. In my case it is /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc.


To create a disk pool, we run the following:

$ sudo  zpool create -m <mount> <pool> mirror <ids>

In my case I want to pool /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc and I want to mount the pool to ~/data:

$ sudo zpool create -m ~/data data mirror /dev/sdb /dev/sdc


You can check the status of ZFS pools with:

$ sudo zpool status


Lastly we need to set the correct permissions for the pool’s mount point using:

$ sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/data


That’s it! If you mounted the pool in the home folder like I did, it should show up in the nautilus sidebar like you see below.


Thanks for reading! If this post helped you, let me know on twitter so I know to keep writing stuff like this up.