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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

As far as I know the ZFS vs GPL issues still haven't been resolved yet. Random incompatibility with the kernel is kind of a thing you need to take for granted if you choose to use ZFS on Linux, because the two code bases just aren't compatible with each other. Linus Torvalds himself has recommended people not to use it in combination with Linux.

Oracle and other ZFS copyright holders could fix this situation by dual licensing ZFS, but they don't care, so you should expect ZFS to break with every major Linux update as not much special care is taken to keep it (and other out-of-tree drivers) compatible.

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There aren’t any viable alternatives to ZFS, however. It would be easier to swap out the rest of the OS.

If you’re building a ZFS based storage server, FreeBSD is a great choice for this reason.

If you can't replace ZFS for your use case, consider replacing Linux instead. There are a few BSDs out there that will run ZFS without the common Linux problem, for instance.

My use case it "Retaining my data long-term", and the options in that realm are more or less tape (hugely expensive), ZFS, or less-reliable systems like unraid.

Unfortunately I do also need to run Linux, to a degree, so I'm using a distribution that removes the DRM.

Is tape really that expensive nowadays? You can find LTO-7 tape drives on ebay for under 1k USD and actual LTO-7 tapes new from the manufacturer for less than 50usd a piece.

If you are storing enough data that you are even considering tape, the cost of your tapes is going to be just as much as a second hand drive fairly quickly and the break even point against HDDs is like 5-6 HDDs or tapes.

I'm storing ~13 TB. Just enough that online backup (Backblaze etc.) is too expensive to be reasonable, not enough that tape is really sensible. ZFS fits the bill, and let me build a reliable off-site backup system to HDDs.

LTO-7 has 6TB of capacity per tape, so I suppose I could get away with... well, ten or so? But it'd be a lot more manual work, and the tape drives are far more expensive than four 8TB HDDs.

With tape, there's also the issue that if you only have one tape drive, you don't know if your tapes are readable in anything else.

Yeah LTO-7 is 6TB uncompressed.

A single 16TB Helium sealed HDD is 350USD (https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-g...).

When you mentioned tape, I was assuming you had a lot more data than just 13TB. Normally I hear people mention it with like 100+TB.

One option could be to run illumos-based system if you need linux compatibility. Lx-zones work pretty well unless very specific capabilities are needed. Of course there's also bhyve for such scenarios.

It's somewhat controversial but there's no real conflict between the licenses at runtime.

At runtime there's no problem in practice, but the disconnect between the two projects causes the occasional friction that can blow up your FS if you run rolling release distros.

blow it up? or just cause it to not work and force you to temporarily go back to an earlier kernel?

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