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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

CLI over browser apps. There is simply less latency than doing anything using browser tech, and sometimes less clicking than with GUI apps.

The ext4 filesystem. Yes, there is no bitrot protection and no snapshots etc, but it's rock-solid as a main OS partition.

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Do you happen to know if there's a linux filesystem that has bitrot protection, but doesn't need snapshots?

- ZFS is not in the Linux kernel so I don't want to use it for a daily work machine

- btrfs works fine but its tools to undelete/recover files when something did go wrong are pretty bad

- XFS looks ancient, not sure how good it is

- ext4 is also pretty aged by now, but is what I use now after my attempt at btrfs. It doesn't have any bitrot protection though

Is there anything else viable today? The above are basically the same choices as I also had 10 years ago

I would use PAR2 for this. It's not the most integrated approach to dealing with bitrot like ZFS, but it feels much more composable - very Unix-like in a sense. PAR2 has one job (protect against bitrot with sidecar parity files) and does it well, and so does ext4 (store files without losing everything).

I certainly wouldn't use btrfs. It ate my data at one point, and misbehaves without any provocation. I don't trust it, and am quite vocal about that whenever it's mentioned.

Zfs will never make it into mainline unless someone rewrites it from a blackbox specification.

The zfs license is incompatible with gpl.

That being said zfs is awesome, it is simple to use, about as bulletproof you can get.

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