mcc"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"
✧✦Catherine✦✧@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?
Chris Petrilli@mcc @whitequark just my take but I consider ZFS aimed at arrays and such. Single drive I’m just not sure you’re going to get any benefit and it might actually be substantial worse.
@petrillic @whitequark do you think there is an advantage of BTRFS over ext4 for a single drive, single computer, non RAID, my sole/primary goal is "i want it to last as long in a room-temperature drawer as possible"?
Daniel LakelandThere are a couple things you can do here... One is BTRFS has checksums so it will *detect* when the data has rotted in the drawer, whereas ext4 doesn't.
Also, BTRFS you can set the mode of data storage to DUP and you'll get TWO copies of every data block (at the expense of being able to store about half the stuff), BTRFS can then do a scrub and detect corrupted blocks and fix them from the good copy.
Finally, you can do compression, snapshots, and sends
snapshots are good for keeping history of things, and send is good for offsite backup.
Oh, and you can do deduplication, which might let you store more stuff?
I have NEVER lost a btrfs drive to anything but hardware failure, I've been using it since about 2012 or something.
@dlakelan @petrillic @whitequark it kinda seems like btrfs has all the same features of zfs, and people like zfs more, but i don't see a lot of reasons other than "vibes" or "super fancy code techniques that matter in high end situations i don't hit"
I think this is a fair high level view. Another things about zfs is the license and such makes integrating it into a "normal" desktop system or whatever a pain in the ass. For example you can't just add a package in Debian.
I 100% suggest you format your single backup drive as btrfs, set DUP for data if you have a big enough drive, and mount it with compress=zstd unless you're storing highly compressed data already.
@dlakelan it sounds like debian has some kind of "spooky" system now where every time it updates the kernel it silently in the background spends a few minutes compiling a kernel so it can integrate the zfs module?
oh it looks like it does now... dkms the debian kernel module system or something similar has been around for a long time, but zfs support is I think relatively new (say last 5 years?)
if you want to use DKMS stuff make sure you install the linux-headers for your linux-kernel package !