I currently have an Unraid server running at home for my personal files as well as some game servers and as a media server.
I have a second machine that I use at a different location that has VPN setup to home so I can work on my projects remotely. I would like to use the second machine to also take backups of my personal files and my docker configs etc.
the second machine is running Pop!OS currently and I have several drives installed. the Issue is I was trying to create a storage pool with ZFS but apparently Pop!OS is like the only distro that doesnt like ZFS.
should I re-image my remote machine to another OS? or should I try and create a pool with something else? I have two 6TB drives and three 2TB drives that I can use, I have some more installed on there but dont really need that much space.
I used to use windows on my second machine and would just connect my shares from unraid as smb and backup with bvckup2 to a windows storage space of all the drives combined. Now I switched to linux and would like to do something similar.
My idea was to combine the similar drives into vdevs and a big pool with ZFS then run luckybackup but that derailed when I tried and failed because of Pop!OS
Your title is about backups but your question seems mostly just about how to set up your storage for backups.
You can go about pooling disks in a few ways but you first need to define what level of protection from failure you want. Before going further though, how much space do you project that you will need for backups?
one backup would be a bit under 3tb, if I could keep a second copy it would be 6tb. I just want some disk failure protection really since these are mostly the drives I pull out from my main server as I upgrade to larger drives
Btrfs works with different hard drive sizes, with 1 disk failure with no data loss.
If the total data is 3tb and you want disk failure protection I would take your two 6tb disks and put them in a mirror. With the amount of data you have and the drive sizes at your disposal that makes the most sense. This leaves you with 3tb free for growth. If you wanted an additional backup I would recommend storing it in a different location entirely or pay a cloud provider like Backblaze.
I would do this with ZFS but you can also do this via LVM or just straight md-raid/mdadm. I'm not sure what your issues are with zfs on popos but they should be resolvable as Ubuntu supports zfs fine to my knowledge.
An alternative you could consider is using mergersfs to logically pool indivial filesystems on each of the disks and then use SnapRAID to provider some level of protection. You'll have to look into that further if interests you as I don't have to much info in my head related to that solution. Its not as safe as a mirror but its better than nothing.