Comment by EvanAnderson

> 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.