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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

And the whole point of RAID is to combat that... But since there is no decent recovery tools for ZFS your entire FS might be toast if the wrong bits are turned.

Yes ZFS is quite resilient against corruption but when it bites, which has happened plenty of times in the past, you are truly screwed.

The philosophy behind ZFS and file system recovery has always been that it is too inconvenient. It is much better to restore from tape backups so why make any effort on recovery?

Thing is, most consumers don't have tape backups...

Because of that, ZFS is in the very vast majority of cases a bad choice for home users, especially under linux where it can hardly be considered mature.

BRTFS just isn't ready yet.

As a home user you can't even get a decent COW FS with decent snapshotting or checksums. That is the sad state we are in and will be in for many years to come.

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"And the whole point of RAID is to combat that..."

Actually the whole point of RAID is to combat a MISSING drive, not a corrupt drive. Parity works when I'm lacking one bit ... not when any of my bits might be lying.

Half of the reason of ZFS is to protect against the scenarios when a drive's internal checksum should catch a data error - but the drives returns bogus data and says 'oh its good'. RAID5 can't catch that(mathematically impossible) ... RAID6 can but most implementations don't check because its expensive(extra IO and calcs)

This is the reason most of your high end SAN vendors don't just deploy RAID5/6/10 but also checksum the data themselves under the covers. They don't trust even high end SAS/FC drives.

Please tell me how my entire FS will be toast if the wrong bits are turned, especially when zraid2 is really the only valid solution that should be used.

I've been using ZFS for years now, i've had disks go bad, I've replaced them. ZFS has protected me from data loss better than anything else. In the past when I've had the disk lie to me, ZFS was able to tell me what files were corrupted and thus had invalid data.

I'm going to need to throw a [citation needed] on your post.

If this is news to you you really haven't been paying attention...

http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Too...

I have been paying attention, and in a lot of cases where there is corruption a fsck wouldn't help anyway. I've had corruption on ZFS, UFS, ext3, ext4, HFS, HFS+ and the only one where I have lost almost no data or no data at all is ZFS (the only time I've lost data on ZFS is when it warned me that the disk was silently given me bad data back because of its end-to-end checksumming, and I didn't have a mirror).

UFS, ext3, ext4 would have continued on giving me bad data back. Are there going to be cases whereby a file system fails completely? Yes, but writing tools to attempt to fix those issues that happen once in a million times is almost impossible because of the difficulty of replicating those failure scenarios and then writing code to deal with the disks having that corruption.

I still trust ZFS with more data than any other file system.

As I've asked elsewhere in this thread: given the way ZFS works, you'll have to elaborate on what an fsck would do that ZFS doesn't automatically do already.

I'm getting "we need an fsck that does magic" vibes here.

I don't quite understand what corruption scenarios fsck on Ext4 would save you from that ZFS wouldn't?

Most data on consumer's computers is 1 disk failure away from loss anyway, hence the popularity of cloud syncing services.

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