Why ZFS?

It´s really really cool that ZFS will be integrated into Leopard. When you read forums like digg or slashdort there seems to be an utter absense of creativity or knowledge, about the advantages someone gets by using ZFS in client operating systems.

To get a view of the benefits, i will describe my workflows on hahdafang, my primary mac@home:

I´m a prosumer photographer. I take many pictures within a year. Dozens of interims version during optimization of the images. when my storage is full, with ZFS i simply add a disk to the pool and i´m done. No linking of new diskspaces and copy orgies.

As consumer backup isn´t capable to do backup above one TB in a cost efficient and simple manner (tape autoloader are so f... expensive), i work with RAID 0+1. With ZFS i can scrub my data and detect data corruption (and not only metadata corruption). Problems get visible long before i start to lose photos.

I archive all my mails: Creating an compressing filesystem is really easy, without loosing any of the advantages of ZFS. You can even switch compression on and off while the filesystem is in use when you detect, that your initial choice to compress or not to compress was incorrect.

With ZFS you have no performance penalty when you create snapshots. Time Maschine of Leopard gets an incredible powerful tool when you use it with real snapshots. Retype a document because you deleted it two days ago is a thing of the past.

With ZFS you can mirror your harddisk asynchronously over an IP network with zfs send/receive by sending increments to an remote site.

I´m an owner of an Siemens Gigaset M740AV network capable settop box for DVB-T. Same with the photos. When my network share is full after i already deleted all this recorded: Buy a new disc, add it to the pool within seconds even at the same time of an running recording.

So ZFS is really usefull. At home. You don´t have to think about storage. Imagine an ever increasing single harddisk in your Mac. Using storage gets really macalike.

(deutsche Version)