ZFSRecv is a Canadian federal corporation, with sites hosted in the US, Canada, and the EU. We built ZFSRecv because it is the service we wanted to use didn’t exist: a safe way to replicate data offsite, and get it back, without being locked into anyone’s ecosystem of proprietary tools or libraries.
Why we built this
We wanted an offsite copy of our own data we could actually trust, not just “it’s somewhere else,” but testably, restorably there, in a format we could walk away from without a migration project. Everything we found asked us to install an agent, adopt an SDK, or trust a proprietary snapshot format we’d only ever be able to read with their tools. We wanted something that would inject unmodified ZFS replication streams, and support ZFS native encryption.
So we built the thing instead: a plain HTTPS endpoint that speaks native zfs send/
zfs receive and nothing else. If you can replicate to another box on your own network, you
already know how to use it. And you can leave exactly the way you arrived, point
zfs send somewhere else, any time.
What we believe
- No lock-in, by construction. The entire API is plain JSON over HTTPS — build a client with whatever language, tooling, or libraries you already use. Nothing proprietary to adopt, and nothing proprietary to escape later.
- Your keys, your terms. Raw sends keep your encryption keys on your side of the wire; we store ciphertext we can’t read, in one or more locations you choose.
- Billed for what’s stored, not what’s sent. Ingress is free, and incrementals mean you store deltas, not full copies. Your invoice reflects what’s actually on disk, nothing else.
- Immutable until you say otherwise. Received snapshots are append-only. Destroying one is always a deliberate, explicit call, never something that happens on a schedule you didn’t set.
The team
ZFSRecv is led by Allan Jude, a well-known OpenZFS and FreeBSD developer. This is the service he always wished had existed, built to be used the way he’d want to use it himself. He’s joined by a small team of systems engineers who hold their own work to the same standard.