ZFSRecv — offsite ZFS replication on ZFSRecv

Quickstart

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You need a ZFS pool running OpenZFS and a ZFSRecv.com API token. No other tools, libraries, or applications required, the send is plain zfs send piped over HTTPS.

Create an account

A pool on ZFSRecv is the receive target for your dataset trees. Create one from your account page — sign up first if you don’t have one yet — and pick a region: tank in the US Southwest region becomes us-sw-01.zfsrecv.com/v1/recv/tank. Your API token is shown once, right there when the pool is created — copy it immediately, and save it somewhere safe, as it isn’t displayed again.

Raw encrypted sends

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With zfs send -w the blocks leave your pool exactly as they sit on disk: still encrypted, still compressed, never decrypted in flight. The receiving side stores ciphertext it has no key for.

What we can see

Raw streams still carry enough metadata for ZFS to reconstruct the dataset tree, so the endpoint necessarily knows structure without knowing contents.

Visible	Not visible
Dataset names and hierarchy	File names and directory contents
Snapshot names and timestamps	File data
Logical and physical sizes	Properties marked sensitive
Encryption root and key GUID	Your wrapping key or passphrase

Keep your keys

We never receive a key. If you lose your wrapping key, the pool’s contents are unrecoverable. by both you us alike. Store a break-glass copy of your key offline, somewhere you trust.

Requirements

The dataset must already be encrypted at rest on the sending pool. -w does not encrypt anything itself; it declines to decrypt.
Sender and receiver must agree on feature flags. Raw sends fail if the receiving pool lacks a feature your stream depends on, our endpoints track OpenZFS release and support all of the latest features.
Increments must chain from a snapshot that was itself sent raw. Mixing raw and regular sends in one chain is rejected.

Verifying a chain

Every snapshot’s GUID is included in GET /v1/detailed alongside its space accounting. Compare GUIDs across an incremental chain the same way zfs get guid would locally, to confirm nothing is missing or out of order before you rely on it for a restore.

HTTP API

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The entire client-facing surface is plain, synchronous HTTPS. There’s no agent, no SDK, and no framing on top of a zfs send stream — just stock zfs send | curl -T - or curl | zfs receive talking to us directly. If you haven’t already, the quickstart walks through your first send end to end; this page is the full reference.

One URL convention holds across every endpoint: the dataset or snapshot name is a path segment, never a query parameter — ZFS names already contain /, so query-encoding one would just add friction. A request to a real path with the wrong HTTP method gets an automatic 405 with an Allow header, before anything else runs.

About Us

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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.

Choose a new password

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Reset your password

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Sign in

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Start replicating

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We'll be in touch

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Thanks for reaching out about Fleet. Someone from our team will email you shortly to talk through regions, hardware options, and pricing.

Your account

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