Comment by mrighele

5 days ago

Good reasons for me:

Checksums: this is even more important in home usage as the hardware is usually of lower quality. Faulty controllers, crappy cables, hard disks stored in a higher than advised temperature... many reasons for bogus data to be saved, and zfs handles that well and automatically (if you have redundancy)

Snapshots: very useful to make backups and quickly go back to an older version of a file when mistakes are made

Ease of mind: compared to the alternatives, I find that zfs is easier to use and makes it harder to make a mistake that could bring data loss (e.g. remove by mistake the wrong drive when replacing a faulty one, pool becomes unusable, "ops!", put the disk back, pool goes back to work as nothing happened). Maybe it is different now with mdadm, ma when I used it years ago I was always worried to make a destructive mistake.

> Snapshots: very useful to make backups and quickly go back to an older version of a file when mistakes are made

Piling on here: Sending snapshots to remote machines (or removable drives) is very easy. That makes snapshots viable as a backup mechanism (because they can exist off-site and offline).