| ▲ | elevation 3 hours ago | |
> can't see the benefits for occasional use I've lost work and personal data to bit rot in NAS filesystems before. Archived VM images wouldn't boot anymore after months in storage. Multiple vacation photos became colorful static part way through on disk due to a bit flip in the middle of the JPEG stream. I've had zero issues since switching to ZFS (even without ECC.) Another huge benefit of ZFS is the copy-on-write (CoW) snapshots, which saved me many times as an IT administrator. It was effortless to restore files when users accidentally deleted them, and recovering from a cryptolocker type attack is also instant. Without CoW, snapshots are possible, but they're expensive and slow. I saw a 20-user office try to snapshots on their 30TB Windows Server NAS hoping to avoid having to revert to tape backups to recover the occasional accidentally deleted file. While hourly snapshots would have been ideal, the NAS only had room for only two snapshots, and would crawl to a halt while it created them. But ZFS's performance won't suffer if you snapshot every minute. When it's time to backup, ZFS' send/recv capability means you only ever move the differences when backing up, and they're pre-computed so you don't have to re-index an entire volume to determine that you only need to move 124KB, making small transfers are lightning fast. Once backup completes, you have verified that the snapshot on both sides is bit-for-bit identical. While this is the essential property of a backup, most filesystems cannot guarantee it. ZFS has become a hard requirement for any storage system I build/buy. | ||