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▲ unethical_ban 4 hours ago

As a mere operator, I've been fascinated by ZFS ever since I first heard of it 15+ years ago. It seems so elegant, like it really is the last generalist filesystem one would ever need. Performant, reliable, fundamentals easy to comprehend. I've never tried managing LVM configs because zpools and raidz are just so damned easy. Native encryption. Datasets can be as simple or as complicated as you need them to be. send/recv dataset syncing at the block level vs having to decrypt and sync files individually.

A lot of this goes over my head as someone who isn't familiar with filesystem internals, but I appreciate the effort and the homage to a great tool.

▲gspr 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

So many really brilliant people keep saying this, so I don't doubt that it's true. Can you explain to an ordinary user why ZFS isn't everywhere? It seems to be a marvel, yet ext4 lives on.

▲storagebits 3 minutes ago | parent [-]

I would say (in no particular order) that the CDDL license is not innocent, ext4 is good enough for many usages, cost ? ZFS is RAM hungry ... but ZFS is well present where it means most (NASes , Proxmox , backups to tell some)

▲storagebits 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks, that's exactly the reader I'd like to reach, and you're not the first to say it goes over your head. Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out who it doesn't go over the head of. Matt Ahrens, maybe? ^^ Next is a "start here" route: one plain question per room, answered before any code. Copy-on-write and snapshots are probably the best rooms to start with today.