ZFS.md (1505B)
1 # ZFS (Zettabyte File System) 2 3 **Source:** [Arch Wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/ZFS) 4 5 **Definition:** ZFS is a filesystem developed by Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), released under the CDDL. ZFS is a COW filesystem that provides exceptional stability and snapshotting. 6 7 ## Features 8 9 - Checksumming of data and metadata 10 - COW Snapshotting 11 - Including the sending/receiving of snapshots (efficiently with streams) 12 - Self-healing (often silent) 13 - Extremely Large Storage Capacity 14 - Supports up to 16 EB file sizes and 256 quadrillion ZB of storage with no file count limit 15 - Pooling 16 - Data Deduplication 17 - This can be useful, but it is costly in terms of RAM usage (1-5GB of RAM/TB of storage) 18 - Data compression 19 - Encryption 20 21 ## Anti-Features 22 23 - Released under the CDDL 24 - Since the CDDL is not compatible with the GPL V3 ZFS can not be shipped as part of the Linux kernel. This results in difficulties with OpenZFS (a fork of ZFS which has continued development in private under the name Oracle ZFS) remaining up to date with the most recent kernel and installation complications (nothing insurmountable, just tedious). This makes it unsuitable for most Linux users. Despite this, it works quite well on FreeBSD. 25 26 ## Who Should Use This? 27 28 Anyone who is looking for a long term storage solution that is not bothered by the CDDL licensing complications. ZFS is likely the most resilient filesystem right now with a multitude of configuration options and exceptional stability.