Uwe Dippel wrote:
vfat/pcfs seems to be the best alternative. Search the archives, and you'll find that under specific circumstances ZFS could damage the data beyond a chance for recovery, so avoid it.
If you care about data integrity, ZFS is your friend.Yes, if your data is corrupted. (NOT BY ZFS MIND YOU, contrary to what is said above). ZFS may well make it very difficult for you to "recover" your corrupt data.
However, I'm not sure that you should be considering this to be a downside of ZFS.
The fact is, ZFS maintains checksums of every piece of data that you write to the disk (in a different place from the data). When it reads, it will compare those checksums. If the checksums don't match, you're in trouble unless ZFS can find a way to fix it. The normal way of doing this is by ensuring that ZFS always has redundant pools. (i.e. raidz or mirrored pools), this way it can always reconstruct and correct data. If you don't create a redundant pool, and your data becomes corrupted, then you're going to be in trouble. (It IS possible to get back the uncorrupted data, but it's not straightforward.)
Finally, don't shoot the messenger. Just because ZFS DETECTED data corruption, doesn't mean that it "damaged the data beyond a chance for recovery". It simply means that ZFS would prefer you to have correct rather than silently corrupted data. (unlike ALL the other filesystems mentioned in this post.).
Provided you've got enough space to create your redundant pools, ZFS is an awesome backup mechanism:I myself keep some UFS, without problem. Only, depending on the purpose of the backup, it is difficult to read from other OSes. Uwe
1: You can use zfs send/receive to copy data from your main pool to your backup pool. 2: You can use "incremental" zfs send/receive to only backup the changes. This is REALLY cool. 3: You can turn on compression on your backup pool to reduce the amount of space used. 4: Your data can be read on both SPARC and x64 as ZFS will do the endian translations for you.
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