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