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by tjoff 5065 days ago
Keep in mind that, with one exception, ZFS is pretty much rock-solid from day one.

Citation needed.

And that article doesn't really address any of the problems that the osnews article brings up, it just tries to sidestep the issue by more or less saying that the same fsck tool that ext uses won't work on ZFS. Great.
2 comments
dmpk2k 5065 days ago
ZFS was released in 2005, and appeared in Solaris 10 in 2006. Close enough?

More importantly, what's the problem with scrubbing instead of fsck?

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tjoff 5065 days ago
ZFS was released in 2005, and appeared in Solaris 10 in 2006. Close enough?

Followed by that was people having issues with data corruption... ZFS is great, but it does break from time to time (whether it is better than other file systems is subjective when you consider the options of restoring it). Low failure rate is, for many, a weak comfort when data is irrecoverable.

More importantly, what's the problem with scrubbing instead of fsck?

Scrubbing repairs data, not broken file systems. Scrubbing is of course great but it isn't the answer for everything.

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dmpk2k 5065 days ago
ZFS is great, but it does break from time to time

Ah, it seems our definitions vary.

ZFS has had problems, but all production filesystems have. From a strict standpoint, what the original author wrote about bugs is wrong, but from a practical standpoint I don't think it matters. ZFS has been as solid as any other production filesystem from the beginning -- which is to say that any production filesystem might one day rear up and bite you. It's just the nature of our profession.

That's just my opinion though. :)

Scrubbing repairs data, not broken file systems.

That depends what's broken. ZFS has ditto blocks (multiple copies of the same block) going up the tree; roughly speaking, the higher up you are, the more there are. The tree and metadata has more protection than the data itself.

If, say, all the ditto blocks and all the mirrors are corrupt, reconstructing that is going to be hard. I think a case needs to be made that an fsck tool would do a better job repairing than scrubbing, which is non-obvious to me.

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petsos 5064 days ago
> Citation needed

Maybe you should provide some citations yourself first before asking citations from others.

"Keep in mind that when ZFS was new it wasn't particularly stable either"

"ZFS isn't for the typical enthusiast/home-user"

"Nope. Never mind that ZFS assumes that harddrives works to spec, which consumer drives do not"

etc.

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