7 ms·

Just wondering why as a normal user I would want to use ZFS? Do I want to try this?

puffoflogic 4y ago
Are you in possession of any Linux ISOs which you'd like to retain for more than a month? Or other bulk data which is inconvenient or impossible to recreate. If so, ZFS can help keep them from bitrotting.
coconut08 4y ago
99+ percent of people wouldn't have a use for it. there are a select few of us who are zfs fanatics who really love and use the feature set. i'm a huge fan of snapshots and having backups on my nas. one might say you could use time machine for that but last time i checked time machine was absolutely terrible for backing up large files as you would get from for example a parallels virtual machine. zfs backups are way better for this since not only is it faster because it only sends the modified blocks, it also takes orders of magnitudes less space because it also only stores modified blocks. zfs also has the added benefit having a plethora open source tools and documentation. it also allows people to dogfood and familiarize themselves with zfs if they plan to or need to use it for other things. apfs and time machine are largely a black box and you need to use it in the way that apple expects you to use it. it has the added benefit of being a next gen filesystem that is cross platform unlike apfs.
- varenc 4y ago
  digression: on macOS it is possible to manage apfs snapshots manually, though it's not great. You take a snapshot with `tmutil snapshot /`, list them with `tmutil listlocalsnapshots /`, and then use the undocumented `tmutil mountlocalSnapshots / <snapshot date>` command to mount a local snapshot. Deleting a snapshot is frustrating though. macOS thins them automatically as the free disk space diminishes. Or you can sort of trigger snapshot deletion with `tmutil thinlocalsnapshots <mount_point> [purgeamount] [urgency]` but it's not explicit what will get thinned. Also all snapshots are at the root file system level. No where near as powerful as zfs, but enough control for my personal uses without relying too much on the whole time machine GUI.
pxc 4y ago
Even if you only have one disk, ZFS can give you transparent compression and dedup, and the ability to save permanent, known-good snapshots instead of just using Time Machine's time-based crap.
- aborsy 4y ago
  With copies =2 you can correct errors too.
mdaniel 4y ago
In this context, it depends on what one considers "a normal user," but I have found that this, OpenZFS on Linux, and OpenZFS on Windows makes ZFS a better cross-platform FS for my needs. I didn't enjoy the exFAT experience, and despite their portability claims, I never got UDF to work at all on any OS (I don't run FreeBSD, so maybe that explains my lack of success) I have read the warnings about not using ZFS on USB disks, but thus far either I've been very lucky or my "USB threat model" is not the same as the people offering those warnings
- Hackbraten 4y ago
  I’ve used it over USB 3 for several years. The thing is that USB controller hardware isn’t perfect, and the bus can break down. If it does break down, chances are the pool metadata becomes corrupt, which means the pool is irretrievably lost. In theory, a corrupted zpool isn’t a problem, because you should be backing up your pool all the time. In practice, it’s a double-edged sword. The downside is that whenever the pool becomes corrupt, you have to do a restore. The upside is that whenever the pool becomes corrupt, you get to do a restore, which you probably wouldn’t do regularly otherwise. Whether or not your bus is going to break down sporadically is unpredictable. With one Mac, it never happened. With another, it’s happened twice a year.
phs318u 4y ago
Back in 2008 (when I was using Solaris daily at work and MacOS at home), I actually had a personal use-case, which I actually took the time to document. https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manage-your-vm-zoo.html https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manag... It was pretty flaky. I'd forget to use the zfs unmount command, accidentally hit the super-friendly eject icon in Finder and BANG! Still, I thought I was just a few months ahead of an Apple sanctified and properly guified native ZFS. In those days I lived in hope of a merger between Apple and Sun. The engineering in both organisations was great. Sadly only exists in the nerd fanfic alternate reality fantasy I'm never going to write.
yamtaddle 4y ago
If you store much data at all, for most any purpose, having ZFS versus not having it is like developing software with source control, compared with life before source control. The main benefits without going nuts with some features you probably don't want on a workstation with anything short of crazy-high specs (mainly de-duplication, it eats lots of memory) are that it: 1) tells you when data has been corrupted even if the disk isn't erroring (and tells you exactly what was damaged) 2) has lightweight snapshots (it's copy-on-write so snapshots basically only cost the difference between the snapshot and either the next snapshot or the current FS) with a very handy access model (you can read from snapshots at will, as if they were a live FS) so you can snapshot before risky file operations and have an easy way to revert without having to go to backups; and 3) Makes various types of disk-pooling and RAID available purely in software. It also provides a common UI to all this across multiple operating systems, so there's less per-platform trivia to remember if you work cross-OS a lot. However, the UI is obtuse enough that it's firmly power-user-only, and a fairly advance power user at that.

Are you in possession of any Linux ISOs which you'd like to retain for more than a month? Or other bulk data which is inconvenient or impossible to recreate. If so, ZFS can help keep them from bitrotting.

coconut08 4y ago

99+ percent of people wouldn't have a use for it. there are a select few of us who are zfs fanatics who really love and use the feature set. i'm a huge fan of snapshots and having backups on my nas. one might say you could use time machine for that but last time i checked time machine was absolutely terrible for backing up large files as you would get from for example a parallels virtual machine. zfs backups are way better for this since not only is it faster because it only sends the modified blocks, it also takes orders of magnitudes less space because it also only stores modified blocks. zfs also has the added benefit having a plethora open source tools and documentation. it also allows people to dogfood and familiarize themselves with zfs if they plan to or need to use it for other things. apfs and time machine are largely a black box and you need to use it in the way that apple expects you to use it. it has the added benefit of being a next gen filesystem that is cross platform unlike apfs.

varenc 4y ago
digression: on macOS it is possible to manage apfs snapshots manually, though it's not great. You take a snapshot with `tmutil snapshot /`, list them with `tmutil listlocalsnapshots /`, and then use the undocumented `tmutil mountlocalSnapshots / <snapshot date>` command to mount a local snapshot. Deleting a snapshot is frustrating though. macOS thins them automatically as the free disk space diminishes. Or you can sort of trigger snapshot deletion with `tmutil thinlocalsnapshots <mount_point> [purgeamount] [urgency]` but it's not explicit what will get thinned. Also all snapshots are at the root file system level. No where near as powerful as zfs, but enough control for my personal uses without relying too much on the whole time machine GUI.

pxc 4y ago

Even if you only have one disk, ZFS can give you transparent compression and dedup, and the ability to save permanent, known-good snapshots instead of just using Time Machine's time-based crap.

aborsy 4y ago
With copies =2 you can correct errors too.

mdaniel 4y ago

In this context, it depends on what one considers "a normal user," but I have found that this, OpenZFS on Linux, and OpenZFS on Windows makes ZFS a better cross-platform FS for my needs. I didn't enjoy the exFAT experience, and despite their portability claims, I never got UDF to work at all on any OS (I don't run FreeBSD, so maybe that explains my lack of success) I have read the warnings about not using ZFS on USB disks, but thus far either I've been very lucky or my "USB threat model" is not the same as the people offering those warnings

Hackbraten 4y ago
I’ve used it over USB 3 for several years. The thing is that USB controller hardware isn’t perfect, and the bus can break down. If it does break down, chances are the pool metadata becomes corrupt, which means the pool is irretrievably lost. In theory, a corrupted zpool isn’t a problem, because you should be backing up your pool all the time. In practice, it’s a double-edged sword. The downside is that whenever the pool becomes corrupt, you have to do a restore. The upside is that whenever the pool becomes corrupt, you get to do a restore, which you probably wouldn’t do regularly otherwise. Whether or not your bus is going to break down sporadically is unpredictable. With one Mac, it never happened. With another, it’s happened twice a year.

phs318u 4y ago

Back in 2008 (when I was using Solaris daily at work and MacOS at home), I actually had a personal use-case, which I actually took the time to document. https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manage-your-vm-zoo.html https://macoverdrive.blogspot.com/2008/10/using-zfs-to-manag... It was pretty flaky. I'd forget to use the zfs unmount command, accidentally hit the super-friendly eject icon in Finder and BANG! Still, I thought I was just a few months ahead of an Apple sanctified and properly guified native ZFS. In those days I lived in hope of a merger between Apple and Sun. The engineering in both organisations was great. Sadly only exists in the nerd fanfic alternate reality fantasy I'm never going to write.

yamtaddle 4y ago

If you store much data at all, for most any purpose, having ZFS versus not having it is like developing software with source control, compared with life before source control. The main benefits without going nuts with some features you probably don't want on a workstation with anything short of crazy-high specs (mainly de-duplication, it eats lots of memory) are that it: 1) tells you when data has been corrupted even if the disk isn't erroring (and tells you exactly what was damaged) 2) has lightweight snapshots (it's copy-on-write so snapshots basically only cost the difference between the snapshot and either the next snapshot or the current FS) with a very handy access model (you can read from snapshots at will, as if they were a live FS) so you can snapshot before risky file operations and have an easy way to revert without having to go to backups; and 3) Makes various types of disk-pooling and RAID available purely in software. It also provides a common UI to all this across multiple operating systems, so there's less per-platform trivia to remember if you work cross-OS a lot. However, the UI is obtuse enough that it's firmly power-user-only, and a fairly advance power user at that.