I had been wanting to try ZFS on my home NAS for a while (for snapshotting/redundancy/data integrity) and finally got enough disks that it made sense. I wasn't looking forward to learning what I presumed to be a very complicated system though. About 15 minutes into my research for setting up and maintaining a ZFS filesystem and I just went - wait thats it? So incredibly simple and well documented, it has been a joy to use. It is very rarely that complicated operations on complicated systems use such simple and easy to understand commands. It just does what I expect!
ZFS is incredibly easy to learn to use, whereas btrfs is quite complicated to learn/use, and even more so if you've used ZFS since a lot of things are either just different enough to be weird, or so different that it makes no sense.
Examples: ZFS snapshots can be recursive (-r) or not, whereas on btrfs they cannot be recursive; in discussions I've seen, this is mentioned as "a feature", since you can create a subvolume for data that you don't want to be part of the snapshot, but it also prevents you from dividing up a logical heirarchy into multiple behaviours (compression vs. not, block size, etc.).
> but it also prevents you from dividing up a logical heirarchy into multiple behaviours (compression vs. not, block size, etc.).
Bind mounts can get around most of the limitations here, at the cost of polluting one directory with the canonical locations of all your special-purpose subvolumes. I think it's still awkward to simultaneously snapshot every subvolume that is mounted under a particular tree for incremental backup purposes.
I had been wanting to try ZFS on my home NAS for a while (for snapshotting/redundancy/data integrity) and finally got enough disks that it made sense. I wasn't looking forward to learning what I presumed to be a very complicated system though. About 15 minutes into my research for setting up and maintaining a ZFS filesystem and I just went - wait thats it? So incredibly simple and well documented, it has been a joy to use. It is very rarely that complicated operations on complicated systems use such simple and easy to understand commands. It just does what I expect!