There's one comparison to ZFS: One of the most noticeable features of NILFS is that it can “continuously and automatically save instantaneous states of the fil

There's one comparison to ZFS: One of the most noticeable features of NILFS is that it can “continuously and automatically save instantaneous states of the file system without interrupting service”. NILFS refers to these as checkpoints. In contrast, other file systems such as ZFS, can provide snapshots but they have to suspend operation to perform the snapshot operation. NILFS doesn’t have to do this. The snapshots (checkpoints) are part of the file system design itself.