Comment by zamadatix

Comment by zamadatix 3 months ago

Windows manages volume snapshots on NTFS through VSS. I think ZFS snapshots are a bit "cleaner" of a design, and the tooling is a bit friendlier IMO, but the functionality to snapshot, rollback, and save your bacon is there regardless. Outside of the automatically enabled "System Restore" (which only uses VSS to snapshot specific system files during updates) I don't think anyone bothers to use it though.

CoW, advanced parity, and checksumming are the big ones NTFS lacks. CoW is just inherently not how NTFS is designed and checksumming isn't there. Anything else (encryption, compression, snapshots, ACLs, large scale, virtual devices, basic parity) is done through NTFS on Windows.

_gea 2 months ago

ZFS snapshots based on CoW are superiour to VSS previous states as they work only on a good will base on open files while ZFS snapshots represent simply the last state of the fiesystem prior a datablock write.

Luckily OpenZFS on Windows is near (currently release candidate 11) with some remaining bugs around volume mount. If you avoid encrypted volumes not a serious problem, good enough for evaluation. Development is fast with a new release candidate every few weeks to adress remaining problems.

The sister project OpenZFS on OSX has already reached release state last week.

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wkat4242 3 months ago

Yes I know that NTFS has snapshots, I mentioned that in another comment. I don't think NTFS is as relevant in comparison though. People who choose windows will have no interest in ZFS and vice versa (someone considering ZFS will not pick Windows).

And I don't think anyone bothers to use it due to the lack of user-facing tooling around it. If it would be as easy to create snapshots as it is on ZFS, more people would use it, I'm sure. It's just so amazing to try something out, screw up my system and just revert :P But VSS is more of a system API than a user-facing geature.

VSS is also used by backup software to quiet the filesystem by the way.

But yeah the others are great features. My main point was though that almost all the features of ZFS are very beneficial even on a single drive. You don't need an array to take advantage of Snapshots, the crash reliability that CoW offers, and checksumming (though you will lack the repair option obviously)

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EvanAnderson 3 months ago

> I don't think NTFS is as relevant in comparison though. People who choose windows will have no interest in ZFS and vice versa (someone considering ZFS will not pick Windows).
ZFS on Windows, as a first-class supported-by-Microsoft option would be killer. It won't ever happen, but it would be great. (NTFS / VSS with filesystem/snapshot send/receive would "scratch" a lot of that "itch", too.)
> And I don't think anyone bothers to use it due to the lack of user-facing tooling around it. If it would be as easy to create snapshots as it is on ZFS, more people would use it, I'm sure. It's just so amazing to try something out, screw up my system and just revert :P But VSS is more of a system API than a user-facing geature.
VSS on NTFS is handy and useful but in my experience brittle compared to ZFS snapshots. Sometimes VSS just doesn't work. I've had repeated cases over the years where accessing a snapshot failed (with traditional unhelpful Microsoft error messages) until the host machine was rebooted. Losing VSS snapshots on a volume is much easier than trashing a ZFS volume.
VSS straddles the filesystem and application layers in a way that ZFS doesn't. I think that contributes to some of the jank (VSS writers becoming "unstable", for example). It also straddles hardware interfaces in a novel way that ZFS doesn't (using hardware snapshot functionality-- somewhat like using a GPU versus "software rendering"). I think that also opens up a lot of opportunity for jank, as compared to ZFS treating storage as dumb blocks.

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