Having used both VSS and ZFS fairly heavily I much prefer the ZFS experience. It seems more predictable and reliable in fulfilling its function. I am pretty st

Having used both VSS and ZFS fairly heavily I much prefer the ZFS experience. It seems more predictable and reliable in fulfilling its function. I am pretty strongly pro-Windows NT. I think there’s a ton of good design and implementation in it. (The parts of NT that came from Win32 are the more irritating parts.) VSS isn’t wholly unreasonable. The design seems pretty well thought-out. I particularly like the VSS providers that can interface with hardware-based snapshot mechanisms and VSS writers to allow software to quiesce IO. It’s all pretty neat, but it seems to fail to take snapshots “mysteriously” pretty often in practice. Since I can’t see the source I don’t have much chance of actually figuring out what’s going wrong either. I also like that VSS is clearly distinct from volume management and the filesystem itself. The layer violation inherent in the design of ZFS seems a bit clunky to me. In use, though, it has done very well for me and I haven’t bumped up against limitations re: volume management and redundancy being tied to the filesystem too much (probably because I’ve always come at it with the expectation that my volumes are pretty much decided at deployment time and migration means starting a fresh zpool and starting over).