On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 9:33 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net> wrote: > Since it's not an option here I've not looked into it too closely > personally, and don't know if it'll fit your needs, but if it does, it > may well be simpler to substitute it into the existing backup setup > without rewriting the WHOLE thing, than to do that full rewrite from > scratch, without the btrfs/zfs features. I'd at least look into it, > assuming you haven't already.
I haven't researched zfs as thoroughly as btrfs and I'm not running it, but you're certainly right that it is more mature (though I would not say that zfs on linux is as mature as zfs on BSD or especially Solaris). Keep in mind that ZFS is marketed more towards enterprise workloads. It isn't quite a dynamic as btrfs is intended to be, though in truth many of those btrfs features like reshaping a raid5 aren't implemented yet. My sense is that you're going to need to plan ahead a bit more with ZFS and making changes without doing a full backup/re-create is going to be harder. It also isn't designed for SSD (though it does have features for SSD caching of the write log and I think also read-caching, which is something that does not yet exist for btrfs). >From what I understand of both I'd say that btrfs actually has the better overall design, but zfs just has a LOT more maturity. I think that btrfs will eventually overtake it, but just when that will happen is anybody's guess, and it certainly isn't there today. The one thing that zfs does have going for you is that you're very unlikely to get BUGs and PANICs anytime you do something as simple as running rsync on it. I will also note that I rsync data off of my btrfs filesystem all the time without issue. I do not have experience with using rsync to write TO a btrfs filesystem. Right now I don't trust btrfs send enough to rely on it - the whole purpose of using rsync right now is to backup my btrfs data to an ext4 partition which lets me sleep well at night while still getting to play around with btrfs and make use of features like snapshots/etc. :) If I was running a large (ie measured in 10s of disks) storage system I'd probably go with ZFS now. In such a setup being limited to RAID6s of maybe 7 drives each and having to add/remove drives 7 at a time wouldn't be a big deal. When you're running a system with 6 disks total that is a much bigger limitation. If you look at something like Backblade's storage pods that is the perfect example of the kind of situation ZFS was designed to handle. On the other hand, btrfs aims to eventually address that while being a decent default filesystem for your smartphone. -- Rich -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
