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But the main thing of an fs is to preserve your files...btrfs can't even check the most important point.
The checksumming helps to spot faulty hardware, that's a step above most other filesystems and often smart info too.
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What about if you were just starting today, with 0 knowledge about basically anything related to storage and how to do it right? That's my case, I'm learning before setting up a cheap home lab and a NAS, and I'm wondering if biting into ZFS is just the best option that I have given today's ecosystem.
I would still go with a collection of composable tools rather than something monolithic as ZFS, and to avoid the learning curve. But again, for personal use. If you're planning to use ZFS in a professional setting it might be good to experiment with it at home.
But I've recently found bitrotin some of my data files and now that I happened to be learning about how to build a NAS, I wanted to make the jump to some FS that helps me with that task.
Could you mention which tools you would use to replace ZFS? Think of checksumming, snapshotting, and to a lesser degree, replication/RAID.
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btrfs does have some advantages over zfs - no data duplicated between page cache and arc - no upgrade problems on rolling distros - balance allows restructuring the array - offline dedup, no need for huge dedup tables - ability to turn off checksumming for specific files - O_DIRECT support - reflink copy - fiemap - easy to resize
But the main thing of an fs is to preserve your files...btrfs can't even check the most important point.
I'll believe it when I see it, why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. At least when we're not talking SSD's ;) ZFS is incredible, curious to mess around with these new features!
I just put two 8TB drives into btrfs because it's a home server, I can't provision things up front. One day I may put a third 8TB drive and turn this RAID1 into RAID5. btrfs lets me do that, zfs doesn't, simple as. One day I may switch the whole thing to bcachefs, which I've donated and am looking forwards to. For the moment, btrfs will have to do. EDIT: downvoted by... the filesystem brigade?
This makes this feature quite ‘meh’. The whole goal is capacity expansion and you won’t be able to use the new capacity unless you rewrite all existing data, as I understand it.
This feature is mostly relevant for home enthusiasts and I think it doesn’t really bring the desired behavior this user group wants and needs.
> Undergoing a live reshaping can be pretty painful, especially on nearly full arrays; it's entirely possible that such a task might require a week or more, with array performance limited to a quarter or less of normal the entire time.
Not an issue for home users as they often don’t have large work loads thus this process is fast and convenient. Even if it would take two days.
this might sound like a troll comment but its coming from someone with almost zero experience with raid. What is the purpose of ZFS in 2021 if we have hardware RAID and linux software RAID? BTRFS does RAID too. Why would people choose ZFS in 2021 if both Oracle and Open Source users have 2 competing ZFS? are they interoperable?
I can't speak with much experience, but what I have gleamed is. - You generally want to avoid hardware raid, if the card dies you'll likely need to source a compatible replacement vs. grabbing another SATA/was expander and reconstructing the array. - zfs handles the stack all the way from drives to filesystem, allowing them to work together (i.e filesystem usage info can better dictate what gets moved around tiered s…
* Swap on ZVOL (data loss)
* Hardlocking when removing ZIL (this has caused dataloss for us)
The article is a great example of all the somewhat surprising peculiarities in ZFS. For example, the conversion will keep the stripe width and block size, meaning your throughput of existing data won't improve. So it's not quite a full re-balance. Other fun things are the flexible block sizes and their relation to the size you're writing and compression ... Chris Siebenmann has written quite a bit about it ( https://…
> The article is a great example of all the somewhat surprising peculiarities in ZFS. For example, the conversion will keep the stripe width and block size, meaning your throughput of existing data won't improve. So it's not quite a full re-balance. This is generally in-line with other ZFS operations. For example, changing compression policies will not rewrite existing data and only new data is affected. It simplifie…
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ZFS likes RAM and uses it to get better performance (and don't think about using dedup without huge ram), but you don't need it and can change the defaults. ECC tends to attract zealots after a perfect error-free existence which ECC does tend towards but doesn't deliver, it just reduces errors. I personally don't care about a tiny amount of bit rot (zfs will prevent most of this) and rebooting my storage machine now…
Does rebooting help with soft errors in non-ECC RAM? I would have thought bit flips would be transient in nature, but I'm not really familiar.
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> why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. BTRFS can do after-the-fact deduplication (with much better performance than ZFS dedup) and copy-on-write files. And you can turn snapshots into editable file systems.
I think cloning a zfs snapshot into a writeable filesystem matches at least the functionality of btrfs writeable snapshots, but I could be ignorant about some use-cases.
So you clone it and delete some files. All good so far, but the snapshot is still wasting space and needs to be deleted.
But to make this happen, your clone has to stop being copy-on-write. All the data that exists in both /home and the clone will now be duplicated.
And you could say "plan ahead more", but even if you split up your drive into many filesystems, now you have the problem that you can't move files between these different directories without making extra copies.