Re: Zfs Guide

On Nov 6, 2022, at 3:43 AM, Michael Schuster <michaelsprivate@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 5, 2022, 22:01 Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org <mailto:steve@sohara.org>> wrote:
>> On Sat, 5 Nov 2022 12:15:06 -0700
>> Joe B <jb1277976@gmail.com <mailto:jb1277976@gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> > So when i installed freeBSD about 5 days ago i noticed that it auto did
>> > ZFS pool and everything didn't know why but i went with it. Trying to
>> > understand it i looked online for some guides and the zfs fs seems very
>> > intresting, snapshots, compression everything. It seems that it was
>> > really made for two drives not one. i kinda understand if my internal
>> > hdd goes out then i would have a backup. 
>> 
>>         Two drives is a minimum for ZFS to be really useful, it does work
>> fine on a single drive and it has benefits over many other filesystems even
>> without redundancy but it is the integration of redundancy and error
>> handling into the filesystem that makes ZFS special.
> 
> 
> Let me repeat what was written recently (by David Cottlehuber, IIRC): ZFS-based boot environments work fine on a single disk and (IMO) justify using ZFS all by themselves. I wouldn't want to be without them.


Although you don't significantly benefit from ZFS' resiliency features in a single-disk setup (though there is still "copies=N":), you do still significantly benefit from the other huge feature of using ZFS: its volume manager capabilities.  So, you still get the advantages that come with snapshots; boot environments; clones; easy filesystem management; fileset/volume attributes (compression, quotas, reservations, etc.); and more.

I've used ZFS as my filesystem of choice since it first appeared in FreeBSD 7 and have never looked back.

Cheers,

Paul.