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Comment by woodman | Hacker News Reader

> ... I couldn't care less if it existed on my desktop OS.

Then you either don't know about snapshots, don't care about data integrity, or have a backup system in place and don't want to replace it with:

  zfs send zroot@snap63 | gzip > /mnt/remotebackup/snap63.gz

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I remember just before Oracle took over Sun, OpenSolaris was a pretty viable desktop machine. They had a feature called "Time Slider" that was built into Nautilus. It was like Apple's Time Machine, only based on ZFS snapshots instead of backups to a separate disk. You could slide a widget back to get to a previous snapshot of the disk. OS upgrades also worked together with ZFS snapshots so that you could atomically roll back to a previous version just before the upgrade took place. It was all really awesome.

PC-BSD ... sorry ... TrueOS Desktop (and Server) has had that idea of ZFS snapshots for "boot environments" for some time.

* https://blog.pcbsd.org/2012/07/9-1-feature-multiple-boot-env...

* https://blog.pcbsd.org/2013/06/pc-bsd-status-update/

* https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/a-closer-look-at-the-changes-...

* https://www.ixsystems.com/blog/the-revamped-life-preserver/

Beadm first appeared in Solaris, long before it hit FreeBSD (and then PC-BSD) - so the idea had been around for a while. The issue is fit and finish. Solaris had it tightly integrated and made full use of it. I haven't used PC-BSD for a very long time, but I don't remember it coming anywhere close to Solaris in that regard.

Yeah, out of the box FreeBSD just barely scratches the surface when it comes to ZFS - there is a lot of untapped potential. Same story with jails and vnet.

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