On Wed, Jan 31, 2024 at 6:45 AM John Covici <cov...@ccs.covici.com> wrote: > > I know you said you wanted to stay with ext4, but going to zfs reduced > my backup time on my entire system from several hours to just a few > minutes because taking a snapshot is so quick and copying to another > pool is also very quick. >
Honestly, at this point I would not run any storage I cared about on anything but zfs. There are just so many benefits. I'd consider btrfs, but I'd have to dig into whether the reliability issues have been solved. I was using that for a while, but I found that even features that were touted as reliable had problems from time to time. That was years ago, however. On paper I think it is the better option, but I just need to confirm whether I can trust it. In any case, these COW filesystems, much like git, store data in a way that makes it very efficient to diff two snapshots and back up only the data that has changed. They are far superior to rsync in this regard, providing all the benefits of rsync --checksum but without even having to stat all of the inodes let alone read file contents. -- Rich
