| 5 Mar 2026 |
 snowflake | gonna try that rn | 20:27:55 |
| 6 Mar 2026 |
 Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | what are the benefits of zfs over btrfs? I'm curious because for me btrfs with subvolumes and compression just works for my needs | 08:20:35 |
 magic_rb | Zfs is actually stable and doesnt randomly fail. Btrfs has a track record of randomly keeling over. Though to be fair, its gotten better and its mostly related to using any of the fancy features of btrfs. Like raid0/1/5/6. Still, zfs is more trustworthy and get more active development. On nixos the fact that its out of tree plays no role as its trivial to install | 08:39:31 |
| magic_rb | I would recommend you go with zfs. I know people that consider data gone if its not on zfs | 08:40:23 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | I have used btrfs for over 5 years now, with an arch installation for 3 years and btrfs never gave me any issues with just subvolumes and compression enabled. I haven't tried to do any raid/mirroring so yeah | 08:40:39 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | Tho I did consider doing zfs when I make my nas in the future | 08:41:25 |
| magic_rb | Definitely go for zfs if you use any raid features, those are just not stable on btrfs. But then once you do, there is no reason to use btrfs anymore.... in my mind its better to have everything formatted uniformly, easier to manage | 08:42:37 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | well the nas would be on a separate device, my desktop is just fine with btrfs. Tho does zfs support features like subvolumes and compression like btrfs? | 08:43:38 |
| magic_rb | Yes | 08:43:57 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | and once I do go for zfs, will contact you to help me get started, seems like you know your stuff | 08:44:01 |
| magic_rb | Btrfs is a reimplementation of zfs | 08:44:09 |
| magic_rb | It supports more than btrfs | 08:44:17 |
| magic_rb | Bear with me here, thing is, if you have zfs everywhere you dont have to context switch and once you start using some of the fancier features of it like zfs send/recv, encryption, raid or zvols, it makes sense to have everywhere... but you do you ofc | 08:45:33 |
| magic_rb | Ofc, message away | 08:45:41 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | for me a filesystem ( atleast for now ) is just there to keep my files, I don't do anything fancy with it. Tho that will prob change in the future but has been this way for the past 7 years | 08:46:43 |
| magic_rb | Give it time :p | 08:47:26 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | I just use restic to backup my important files to a separate btrfs 128gb drive ( my backups are like 2gb ) and backblaze b2 bucket | 08:48:15 |
| magic_rb | Tbh same, im planning to look into a more zfs native solution, but for now havent | 08:48:55 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | I might go ahead and reformat my backup drive and my games drive with zfs to test it out, and then move my main nvme to zfs also slowly | 08:49:37 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | I do think my vps's just use ext4 with lvm | 08:49:59 |
| magic_rb | Ill send you some stuff, formatting as zfs isnt a fire and forget. You gotta make the right choices or youll regret it later | 08:50:41 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | I also just backup them to a backblaze bucket | 08:50:46 |
| magic_rb | Ive got a pretty tuned setup at work, ill share once at a computer. (I just woke up) | 08:51:05 |
 focu5 | zfs snapshot and backup to a separate pool off machine is why I have my laptop using zfs even though it's 1 drive and doesn't have the error detection let alone correction | 08:51:05 |
| Crony Akatsuki (balkan/slav) | sure, tho will prob reformat tomorrow, since I got work in couple hours ( 10 hours shift + hour commute ) | 08:51:19 |
| focu5 | also zfs encryption | 08:51:21 |
| focu5 | it's just nice | 08:51:22 |
| magic_rb | Even on a single disk, you gain checksumming. Ext4 will happily give you corrupted data, zfs wont | 08:51:53 |
| magic_rb | And you could still enable data redundancy even on a single disk | 08:52:05 |
| magic_rb | Dont use that one personally. I always put zfs on top of LUKS | 08:52:21 |
