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On 28/10/2018 19:57, M. J. Everitt wrote: > Yes, I met ZFS when I tried out a FreeNAS box for my last employer. Worked > pretty nice, and the regular snapshots made backups, and restore, a > complete breeze. > > I've yet to implement on my Linux systems, but as support and maturity > grows, I shall have little hesitation to run with it again, and enjoy all > the benefits it has. I don't believe there is any other FS around with such > a feature-set as ZFS although various people rave about btrfs, xfs, etc etc... I was an UNIX guy before Linux (last generation for that I guess?) and of all the cool big iron vendors Sun were my favourite by a mile. So I remember ZFS originally appearing on Solaris like something that had just arrived from space or the future or something. SGI invented XFS and LVM originated from HPUX/AIX/Veritas so I was familiar with all the "big boy toys" years before they bled into Linux. But ZFS - at least now it's rock solid on Linux - on root (NOT just your data volumes!) will seriously change how you use computers, it's that much of a game changer. ZFS isn't just a filesystem, it's something that you interact with daily once you really adapt to it and starts to infiltrate your workflow in subtle ways. It's hard to explain but the last computer thing that impacted me this profoundly was probably virtual machines. I don't make folders much any more, zfs datasets everywhere. I never operate on single instances of data either - snapshots are free, clones are free, everything is instant. zfs scrubs via cron have already saved me from a few nasty bitrot episodes over the years especially at clients with a lot of legacy data parked on arrays slowly mouldering. Nothing else can even come close at this point, especially BTRFS (even if it worked properly, which it doesn't). Once you get your head around it as an active participant in your / filesystem and your daily workflow there's no going back - this uncharacteristically makes it a poor candidate for the usual "I'll stuff it in a VM and test it now and again" approach 'cos you just don't get enough hands-on battle testing in with it that way. Just be prepared to buy more RAM. And then almost immediately start thinking about buying even more RAM haha. In that regard ZFS was the final straw that broke the back of my poor old i5/2500k + 16Gb RAM workhorse - it was still clinging on with ext4/LUKS on sata SSDs but now it's _really_ feeling the load. Which is fine because that means I'm finally greenlit on treating myself to the workstation upgrade of my dreams* once I've finished upgrading literally all the other creaking outdated crap in my house first. Anyway, next time you rebuild a personal PC go with ZFS from the start, you'll never look back. Cheers * dreams subject to practical downgrade by the missus of course, to stop me spending car money on a computer. Again. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq