I believe I got default cron-files when I installed ZFS on ubuntu 21.04. It could be that they were created and I had to uncomment one line in a file. Then a scrub on the pools would run once a month. Then I setup email on the server and everytime a scrub is done with any errors, I get an email.

Quite easy for me to setup, even though its my first NAS that I built myself and first time using ZFS. Very surprised that LTT effed that up to be honest.

It's less Linux and more weather or not you have a database/NAS centric distribution I think.

The problem with by default installing a cron job when installing ZFS is that for a general purpose OS there a good default for when and how often to run it. And running it on the wrong time might even be a major problem.

Through then tbh. having a bad default is probably still better then no default in this case.

> lose data before noticing

Is a bit of an overstatement as they didn't look for quite a while, they also did not only fail to do scrubbing, they also failed to setup automated health checks and reporting.

Turning a non NAS focused Linux distribution into a well working and tuned NAS isn't easy (compared to using a good NAS OS/distribution), but making it somewhat work is easy. Which makes this a pretty common mistake for non-specialized people (i.e. like in their case).