macOS Snow Leopard almost adopted ZFS.

But a few weeks before release, Sun was acquired by Oracle.

It was going to take months of further negotiations to nail it down. Apple-sourced ZFS on macOS was canceled.

ZFS had been released by Sun before the Oracle Situation under their MIT-like CDDL.

I suppose when Big Tech is involved, they rattle patents at one another until the dust settles with handshakes and payouts all around. I'm speculating here. But I was told that the CDDL was not considered sufficient for Apple to support its own development efforts.

ZFS is relatively complicated, but it generally works. At the time, Apple was shipping servers with iSCSI SAN and a GUI comparable to Disk Utility.

Really a shame. I was running native ZFS on my Mac Pro that summer. Eventually migrated those pools to Open Solaris and eventually to Linux.

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j45 6 hours ago | parent [-]

ZFS looked promising and capable at the time. Do you have any recommendations for today?

It can feel like until there's a bit more clarity or certainty publicly, or personally running multiple backups on different file systems is the default start, which isn't always ideal.

I like storage to become, and remain an appliance.

	▲	TheNewsIsHere 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I’m managing hundreds of terabytes on (Open)ZFS in 2025. It’s as promising and capable as ever. It doesn’t really have a stable and battle tested competitor in the FOSS arena considering its feature set. (Of course there are things like Lustre and Glustre, but these are orthogonal solutions for different use cases.)
	▲	unsnap_biceps 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		It's still promising and capable. Development is active and ongoing. I'm quite happy using it.
	▲	xmodem 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The path we've collectively chosen as an industry is to push those responsibilities further up the stack into the application layer. No widely-deployed filesystem before or since ZFS is in the same league.
	▲	dangus 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I love TrueNAS community which runs on ZFS for my NAS system. For workstations I just use the distribution default. APFS on Mac, NTFS windows, and my Linux distro happens to use btrfs by default.