jq is mot custom syntax though, it is just JSONPath standarsld. Which is also used to query JSON in JSON fields in MySQL for instance.

I’ll be honest, I never tried it that way. But it should be possible. If you have the possibility, I’d advise to simulate that in a VM, then you’ll know for sure! But basically importing zpools should even be OS agnostic, as it is an open standard that you can just install on any OS. I’ve heard stories about people even migrating pools from core to scale and vice versa, which is going from BSD (core) to scale (debian linux).

What do you mean live? Sorry, I’m still quite new to this…

I’m not sure exactly what your setup is, if you have data in the OS pool that might be gone, unless you can boot the system from a stick and mount that disk to copy data over. Zpool export isn’t strictly necessary.

If your data is in a different pool then it should be theoretically easy to just import that pool in a new install.

Hmm I think RAID5 would be risky. If I have a 16TB array and then get a failure, resilvering would take long and that could bring a second disk down…

That is true, but I was indeed not counting it as such, I currently just have the cloud as a backup.

I understand, but I was thinking, since I have a cloud backup, if my drive(s) fail I cam still always recover, correct?

Yes definitely! It is personal data like family videos, photo’s and documents mostly. I’m using this nextcloud for the whole family.