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Comment by doublepg23 | Hacker News Reader

I've heard theories of how a license change could be possible but they all seemed more hope-based than reality-based.

I wouldn't let that keep you that from using ZFS though, it's an incredible battle-tested filesystem and features like native compression, encryption, and block-level backups make it an easy choice over ext4 for any of my systems.

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These features keeps me solidly with ZFS (since a decade):

0. Cross-platform (I use ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD, and [previously] macOS).

1. Pervasive check-summing/scrubbing, protection from silent bitrot

2. Low-cost COW snapshots (which can be directly accessed with ~/.zfs/snapshot)

3. Steaming file system state with zfs send / zfs receive (this is super important for backup and replication)

AFAIK, no other FS has all of this.

btrfs has 1, 2 and 3, and if you count projects like WinBtrfs [0], then possibly 0 as well.

Been using it happily for years on my workstations, and about a year on my home server mainly because of the licensing issue and a kernel update possibly resulting in the ZFS pool not being imported.

ZFS is still great, but the kernel issue is still problematic on anything other than Ubuntu, where Canonical ships kernels with ZFS built right in.

[0]: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs

Maybe the problem is me but I’ve never had a good time with mainline btrfs. I use it on a Synology without issue (they use a lot of patches and seemingly however use the built in RAID support.) but btrfs takes the cake for “unrecoverable errors from a filesystem” whenever I’ve used it for more than a “ext4++” filesystem on a single disk.

These features keeps me solidly without ZFS: 0. Powercut zfs host : cannot import pool without destroy old and create new. 1. For case "0" need minimum 2nd zfs host while backup restore even slower. 2. Extrem slow meta-/data reads with aging, eg try tar any dir to /dev/null. 3. So stay working with other alternatives and have fun.

Can you elaborate on the power cut data loss? I’ve never heard about that and I’m in the process of planning the addition of a ZFS pool to my home NAS.

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