[retro64]

In all honesty I can't understand why would anyone use anything other than zfs nowadays for important data.

At a personal level, I opted out of it based on simplicity and familiarity. If I have a data drive where I need to move and mount in another box, I do not want to mess with the complexities of supporting ZFS to get at that data or the risk that the only OS I have available can't read it.

Again, this is a non-commercial environment, but I consider my data important as well. I've decided to go the route of keeping multiple backups of my data spread across multiple drives. I've already experienced bitrot several times over the years, but for me, this approach is more practical than relying on ZFS.

[radiowave]

I don't mean to be criticizing your choices, but I'll note here that if you're willing to avoid enabling the latest and greatest ZFS features, bringing up a machine that can mount your disks can be as simple as booting from Ubuntu install media, and having internet available so you can run "apt install zfsutils-linux".

(And somebody's probably going to correct my ignorance and point out that beyond some release 'x', the ZFS stuff is already built-in.)

[retro64]

Is it that easy now? I actually was in this situation about 3 years ago and found I could not simply mount the ZFS drive - and I cannot recall exactly why. I think it had something to do with the pool…configuration(?), and I went down a rabbit hole trying to sort it out. Fortunately in this case the tradeoff in time was more valuable than the data (it was a system drive on a small SSD) so I had the option to ditch my efforts with little to lose. But, I did spend a handful of hours on it with no traction.

[bpfrh]

I was able to transfer a zfs pool from a linux server to a freebsd server with different hardware simply by moving the physical disks to the new server.

For me ZFS has been rock solid, even with power cuts during running vms(linux and windows) and a scrub.

I even managed to steal away enough ram from a server so that ZFS produced a stacktrace in dmesg, no data corruption, even on running vms.

[znpy]

Yes it is :)

[asveikau]

I've used FreeBSD install media to recover too. You can get a shell and there's no need to download other stuff.

I haven't done this to recover ZFS as written by Linux or Solaris/illumos, not sure how well that works but wouldn't be surprised if it does.