HACKER Q&A
📣 diablo1

Advantages of Using ZFS on Ubuntu?


So the new Ubuntu is out (version 20) and I was wondering if I should experiment with ZFS[0]. I read about ZFS online and I'm impressed by its ability to be resilient and survive power outages and still keep your files intact.

But what's the main unique selling point of ZFS and why would this USP compel someone to use it over say, ext3/4?

Also, how does one go about encrypting files with ZFS? I thought LUKS works just fine. Is the crypto in ZFS even vetted and peer reviewed and audited and can I trust it?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

  👤 znpy Accepted Answer ✓
ZFS differs from ext3/4 in the sense that ZFS correspond roughly to ext3/4 + lvm + luks + snapper.

This is because ZFS is a volume-managing filesystem.

IMHO the best feature is snapshotting: you can take a snapshot of a filesystem, change anything and then decide if you want to go back or continue.

This is invaluable for backup: you can take a snapshot, perform an update (change kernel, update some service, alter a database table or whatever) and then try and validate the update. If anything goes wrong you can restore the whole state of the filesystem to the snapshot time.

This has saved me when a nextcloud update went wrong and basically trashed my installation. No worries: I shut down everything, unmounted the filesystem ("dataset", in zfs parlance) and roll-back the filesystem.