[phil21]

I wanted to say "as someone who tends to follow the unix philosophy" and realized the irony of saying that regarding ZFS...

That said, I generally agree with you in that do one thing and do it well is a laudable design goal. However, I also am very excited about encrypted ZFS for one main reason: backups.

Okay two. Snapshots and backups!

ZFS is absolutely amazing to use as a home NAS that does daily (or more) snapshots and then nightly differential syncs to a second location. In the past I had to run all my own infrastructure to do this, as the data was in the clear.

Now my ZFS nerd friend and I can simply swap backup space and have "zero knowledge" of the others' files, while retaining the amazing features of ZFS snapshots+zfs send/receive.

This also tickles the "create an encrypted ZFS backups as a service" service itch for me, but then I realize I'd be creating it for all 13 potential users of the service. That said, I'm sure rsync.net will offer this functionality shortly - which would make them a viable backup target for me.

[p_l]

Regarding "unix philosophy" and ZFS... it's actually very compliant with it, despite uninformed claims from early public release about "blatant layering violations".

It's just that majority of users never have reason to see more than tiny signs of the layers hidden behind (mostly) 2 command line tools, and for various reasons those layers are compiled into one one module.

But the clean layered design is how LustreZFS happened :)

[stubish]

https://zfs.rent/ is very interesting.

I also recall someone working years ago on a way to push snapshots to S3 or similar, but I never heard if that idea got off the ground (downside is of course the snapshots need to be recovered before they can be mounted, but the dollar cost would be rock bottom).

What would be more interesting is a backup application for Desktop Linux that assumes a ZFS root; all the problems that plague Desktop applications (that seem to keep them in eternal beta or wither away) disappear. It needs to switch on and push snapshots. It needs allow the remote file system to be mounted (to browse the snapshots for selective recovery). It needs a a disaster recovery process to recover an entire system from a remote snapshot.

[hrez]

> I also recall someone working years ago on a way to push snapshots to S3

You can pipe zfs send to gof3r.

[rakoo]

rsync.net already provides zfs receive capability: https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html