Btrfs killed ZFS (on my desktops)

not-btrfsFollowing the latest post about Btrfs, until yesterday both ZFS and Btrfs were running for testing and evaluation purposes, in my primary desktop machine.

The outcome was pretty straight forward, i wiped all the ZFS stuff from the disks.  Now, my desktop is just running Btrfs (also root/boot).

Why?

Very simple reason, Btrfs is very well integrated with the OS, right from the system install, to the automatic apt-snapshots (that already saved my ass a couple of times), to the graphical tools graceful integration. On the other side, ZFS…. let’s just say that to use ZFS you actually have to add a repository and then install ZFS in the system, and just then you are ready to start and use it.

Actually both of the file systems are from Oracle, but Btrfs is GPL licensed and ZFS is CDDL license so don’t expect a kernel/OS integration anytime soon….

For my personal needs, Btrfs has all the whistles and bells, mainly sub-volumes, snapshots and compression. And it’s pretty damn fast and stable (zero problems to this day). The only thing i miss is native encryption, but probably it will roll out in an upcoming version. Sure ZFS can be more mature and feature rich, but it’s lack of integration it’s just a pita (at least for linux desktop)…

For more in depth information about Btrfs i totally recommend this presentation:

 

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