I work in a niche inside a niche. I deal with terabytes of storage, massive servers, a variety of storage tech, and I’ve been in interested in computers in general for… Around 40 years. (Yeah, I’m old.)
I have my own single person company and have worked in 40+ US states, done assignments in the UK, Norway.
AMA.
I’m only familiar with ZFS, but only in my lab, not in production… ZFS is great because it can self-heal files / re-allocate blocks. I tried it on SMR drives, and it’s terrible, I advise against it. :)
ZFS is very good, but OFFSITE, TESTED BACKUPS are critical. There’s ‘reliable’ storage (storage that can deal with a failure) and then there’s backups. All the parity in the world won’t save your data from a fire.
In my small office, I have about 100TB of data that’s important to me, so I have a local copy, a backup in my office, and a stack of tapes at home about 1km away. Anything that affects both locations is outside my threat model, as I’ll have bigger issues.