Anyone planning on ZFS or BTRFS for file systems?

[Arwen]

These file systems are meant for scenarios where there is redundancy in the form of multiple drives.

Trying to apply ZFS or Btrfs to eMMC alone may be worse than not using either system - it could be all working fine one moment but corruption in the wrong place means total loss of everything and no way to fix it at all - in similar situations, other file systems could recover.

I can't speak about ZFS, but BTRFS is not only meant for redundancy. RAID1 and DUP are among the possibilities. But it's also about providing subvolumes, snapshots, CoW, compression, checksum on everything, etc.
All these valid features even on small devices (Jolla even used it for that exact puprose on their first smartphone).

Thankfully, due to the way BTRFS has data laid out there is no such thing as a single wrong place that loses everything. I've been through some flash media corruption (including hiqh quality SD from reputable brand names - but you now, bad luck happens), and each time I've still been able to recover nearly everything (btrfs restore is your friend).

Yes, ZFS has RAID-1, (aka Mirroring), DUP, (aka "copies=2"), subvolumes, (aka datasets), snapshots, CoW, compression, (can select different methods, by dataset), checksums on everything, (can select different algorythms, by dataset).

One thing that ZFS does, is have attributes stored with the subvolume, (aka dataset). That means you don't have to remember you choose LZ4 compression. It's always there, until you change it, ("zfs set compression=off rpool/home" for example).


There are ways that BTRFS can loose data. It's not a totally COW;

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/..._rename.3F

For home use, I'd not worry about it. But, for data center use, (in reference to BTRFS in general, not BTRFS on Pinebook Pro), I'd consider this un-acceptable.