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cyberpunktoday at 6:17 PM3 repliesview on HN

What well known data-losing bugs are there in zfs? It can be slow, and resource hungry, but afaik it's about as safe as they come (and I've been using it in prod since solaris 10)


Replies

sellmesoaptoday at 6:33 PM

I never dug into the failure, but I once had a ZFS get to a state where it would crash the kernel on mount, I was able to mount it with checks turned off an recover what was important, but it was a spooky experience. I live on the bleeding edge of file systems for my desktop, I was on reiser4 back when that was fresh, I daily drive bcachefs (it's been great!) Mostly I've been lucky, I don't usually keep an openbsd system around, but I love FreeBSD and I'll give OpenBSD a try with GEFS for sure!

alethictoday at 6:31 PM

There was a long-running data corruption issue with non-raw sends that was finally found and patched in 2025: https://github.com/openzfs/openzfs-docs/issues/494. But I agree, it's about as safe as they come. I trust it far more than any other file system, in large part due to all its built-in redundancy and the way it makes backups trivial (encrypted sends <3)...

yjftsjthsd-htoday at 7:25 PM

Its native encryption has something of a poor history