"Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel"
@mcc been that way for decades now
@whitequark I have a new hard drive I intend to use primarily for backup and I am currently considering BTRFS or ZFS for the Linux part instead of ext4 (because I hear they can do some thing of storing extra error-checking data to protect against physical disk corruption). In your view, if I intend to use mainline Debian indefinitely, will BTRFS, ZFS, both, or neither give me the least pain getting things working?

@mcc @whitequark

AIUI, ZFS really requires multiple drives to be effective.

You might gain a little value from extra checksums on file system blocks on a single drive, but if those checksums ever start failing on a hard drive there is a high likelihood that most of the drive is about to fail completely.

I had researched ZFS a fair bit as I planned to build my own FreeBSD NAS around 3-4 drives in ZFS, but eventually decided to buy an off-the-shelf ZFS NAS from the TrueNAS people.

@CliftonR ok. is it accurate zfs can be snapshotted and restored more efficiently (in terms of on-disk cost) than ext4?somebody also said something about btrfs allowing zstd compression (for some of the disk? for all of the disk?)

@mcc in btrfs - every file can have different compression, if you're crazy enough. What I do is set compression on the root folder of a new fs, and let that be inherited everywhere.

btrfs property set . compression zstd:8 ; chattr +c .