> ZFS will not protect you (by default) against bit flips in memory (please use ECC) or kernel bugs. If the disk buffer is corrupted in the kernel, on its way t

> ZFS will not protect you (by default) against bit flips in memory (please use ECC) or kernel bugs. If the disk buffer is corrupted in the kernel, on its way to the file system layer for dispatch, ZFS will happily checksum and perfectly store the bad data. That's all very well but I don't see how your suggestions of doing archive backups make this any less of a problem, you are just operating on a higher level layer with the same problems. I'm also fairly sure most servers are built with ECC these days, I know my IaaS provider uses it. > Finally, as with all complex file systems, ZFS is notorious for difficulty in recovering from multi-bit errors, often requiring "pool surgery" and multi-day disk scrubs to remount the file system. Perhaps your data is eventually recoverable, but do you have a week to finish the scrub to get it back online? I cannot claim to have extensive ZFS war stories but I have had errors on a bad block device in a mirrored pool, but with this type of pool it does not affect mountability or performance. The only annoying performance issue affecting mountability I've had so far was when accidentally filling up a pool that had dedup enabled, since it struggles to function in the reserve area.