ZFS send does not do any kind of cross checking with the receiving end so no, not really ideal. Even incremental ZFS sends don't do this, it keeps state on the

ZFS send does not do any kind of cross checking with the receiving end so no, not really ideal. Even incremental ZFS sends don't do this, it keeps state on the sending side only. It's ok for its intended usecases but it's not a direct rsync replacement. It's also hard/impossible to restore individual files out of a ZFS send stream without restoring the whole thing so I've reverted to using tarballs of ZFS snapshots for backups instead of ZFS send. Again, it was never really meant for this so it was my mistake trying to use it that way.