Complete Noob

[cy@]

Not only coming from Linux.

UFS is a fully sufficient, fast, reliable, sophisticated, pleasing, while at the same time easy to setup, easy to use, and easy to maintain filesystem. I run it on both my laptop drives, and I would never think of running ZFS on a RaspPi sd-card.

Besides I don't really get it, why some people use ZFS on single partition pools - snapshots, I know. But besides I doubt that justifys all the downsides you get with ZFS, which produces all its benefits on raid configs, and AFAIK UFS is also capable of doing snapshots, there are other ways, and backups have to be done anyway - I always recommend people to start on FreeBSD with UFS.

ZFS does provide better data recovery. A minimum of three copies of metadata are written to disk. Each block is checksummed with a hash. You will almost always know when your data is corrupt with ZFS. UFS and old-school filesystems like it don't do this.

UFS has recently (over the last five years) obtained the facility to checksum its metadata. But UFS offered by the other BSDs, Solaris and other legacy systems don't do this.

Plus under some circumstances UFS is even faster than ZFS.

ZFS simply needs some learning. Of course, it's a great FS. No question. I use it myself on several machines and pools for many years. But it's for sure no beginners FS. One simply needs some experience in FreeBSD itself, before you start on ZFS. Trying to start new on both FreeBSD and ZFS at the same time is almost guaranteed to fail.

ZFS is a different paradigm. It's volume manager and filesystem wrapped up in one.

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with UFS.
I don't get it.
I believe many people don't think much ahead, underestimate needed learning effort while overestimating their expertise.

That's like anything. Read this book.

 

[Useradd]

UFS and old-school filesystems like it

An old-school filesystem for an old-school operating system: UNIX. I like to keep things simple on my home computer, so I choose UFS. I understand why others prefer, or even need ZFS. Neither can be considered superior to the other; it's a matter of preferences or requirements.

 

[cy@]

An old-school filesystem for an old-school operating system: UNIX. I like to keep things simple on my home computer, so I choose UFS. I understand why others prefer, or even need ZFS. Neither can be considered superior to the other; it's a matter of preferences or requirements.

Yeah.

All my systems here at home use both. They boot off UFS while ZFS is for data. The reason: I clone them rather than install them from scratch. For example, when I cloned my old laptop to my new laptop I simply had to change a few settings in rc.conf and some device names in fstab. Then for data I did a zpool attach to create a mirror to a partition on the new disk and zpool split to detach the mirror as its own pool. Finally remove the disk (ssd) from the enclosure and put it into the new machine. Boot, make some final adjustments and all may settings, ports, packages, and data are as they were on the old laptop. A job that might have taken days to set up installing ports and packages and copying data took a few hours during an evening. Most of which was done while I made dinner and cleaned up the kitchen.

I've done this for all my systems since my first FreeBSD (2.0.5). I also did this professionally when I worked on Solaris and Tru64 UNIX. I've yet to duplicate this on Linux because of LVM. The last time I did try it Linux, clone a Fedora system while converting rootfs from XFS to EXT4, resulted in the complete loss of all data. There is something to be said about the simplicity of booting off UFS while using ZFS for data.

I suppose a person could do something similar with a ZFS-only system.

UEFI does complicate things as the EFI partition also needs to be copied. Not specifically copied per se but when cloning from a traditional BIOS system to a UEFI system one must create the EFI partition by hand. Then play around with the UEFI BIOS to find the boot file. Certainly doable, done it twice.

 

[ralphbsz]

Besides I don't really get it, why some people use ZFS on single partition pools -

In addition to the other reasons mentioned: Checksums.

 

[astyle]

Besides I don't really get it, why some people use ZFS on single partition pools - snapshots, I know.

ZFS allowed me to forget all about partitioning. What ZFS has instead of partitions - it's called datasets. They work just like partitions, except that I can adjust sizing, limits, etc. after the installation if I choose. Saved me a LOT of time trying to do the math and planning on how to lay out my disk. FreeBSD used to take hours to install. Now with help of ZFS, I can do a speedrun of installing FreeBSD in 10 minutes or less - all because I don't have to think about partitioning. Freakin' simple, if you ask me! Oh, and I get all the other benefits of ZFS that I did not even know existed!

 

[Maturin]

better data recovery

Checksums

datasets

You're not helping my case here

My point in and for this thread was to make newbies not feel bad about chosing UFS, instead of underlining the benefits of ZFS, or even playing UFS down as some useless garbage.

I believe we all pretty agree ZFS needs additional learning. It ain't no beginner's filesystem.
So, I think it can be an additional burden for a newcomer never dealt with both before FreeBSD nor ZFS to get into FreeBSD, when he or she still lacks basic fundamentals in FreeBSD itself, and at the same time already tries to start with ZFS, especially when she/he experienced only turn-key OS before.
While UFS is a fully sufficient filesystem.

 

[ngnicholson]

When you used virtualbox, did you remember to remove the install media when you rebooted the virtual machine.

 

[ngnicholson]

I have used linux for over 20 years & found the FreeBSD install much easier. I helped a relative try Void linux & Artix linux over the weekend. Both installed easy however when going to do the first software update both vm's had problems with dependancy conflicts & failed the update. I then setup a FreeBSD vm for him in about 20 minutes & he was shocked at how easy the system was to install, update & has XFCE & KDE installed so he can try them out. He is a FreeBSD convert.

 

[astyle]

I believe we all pretty agree ZFS needs additional learning.

That part, I agree with... it does have lots of interesting features, and can be extremely powerful if one bothers to learn it.

It ain't no beginner's filesystem.

I'd say it is - it was designed to relieve people of extra thinking efforts on how to do it right from get-go. Beginners can just accept the defaults, and mess around later if they choose. No other filesystem does that. with other filesystems, you have to think about what numbers to put in so that it gets installed correctly. Not with ZFS. That makes it a great system for beginners.