Why I fell in love with ZFS

A couple of days ago, I downloaded the ISO image for FreeBSD and decided to ditch my Windows installation. While partitioning the disks, I noticed a new filesystem called ZFS. Being into technology, I kinda knew what it was-I just thought it was another filesystem like ext4. Oh boy! Was I wrong?

ZFS is a whole new level. It has all the features I wish I had. ZFS handles disks and drives in a different way than ext4. It has pooled storage which completely eliminates the use of volume managers when handling multiple drives (vdevs). This filesystem has another interesting feature, which is its ability to handle redundancy, so even if a drive goes haywire, you still have the ability to access your data. Note that redundancy is not present on stripes(obviously). It also has features like quota where you can set limits on the size of each dataset present in a zpool. The main feature (my personal favorite) of this filesystem is that it can take snapshots of datasets. These snapshots are read-only files which can then be backed up to another place using rsync. Even if I mess up my installation while loading a custom kernel module, I can simply restore to the previous snapshots.Alas!

Although ZFS is an excellent filesystem, it has a very steep learning curve (which I think is okay) for which you have to make a commitment to learning . During my time with FreeBSD on ZFS, I had a lot of RAM usage. After going through some forums, I quickly learned that it was caching data and that it would shrink automatically when I needed RAM for other processes. One disadvantage of using this filesystem on older drives is that it may reduce the lifespan of hard drives (ones with magnetic platter) due to its copy-on-write model. Anyway, for the past 1 and a half month it has been a blast using this filesystem. Even during the few days I used this filesystem, it has saved me from losing all my data. I can now say that the switch to FreeBSD was worth it. I would like to conclude by saying that ZFS is a brilliant filesystem and if you have the opportunity to try it out, you definitely should and also consider switching to it.