So the new Ubuntu is out (version 20) and I was wondering if I should experiment with ZFS[0]. I read about ZFS online and I'm impressed by its ability to be resilient and survive power outages and still keep your files intact.<p>But what's the main unique selling point of ZFS and why would this USP compel someone to use it over say, ext3/4?<p>Also, how does one go about encrypting files with ZFS? I thought LUKS works just fine. Is the crypto in ZFS even vetted and peer reviewed and audited and can I trust it?<p>[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
ZFS differs from ext3/4 in the sense that ZFS correspond roughly to ext3/4 + lvm + luks + snapper.<p>This is because ZFS is a volume-managing filesystem.<p>IMHO the best feature is snapshotting: you can take a snapshot of a filesystem, change anything and then decide if you want to go back or continue.<p>This is invaluable for backup: you can take a snapshot, perform an update (change kernel, update some service, alter a database table or whatever) and then try and validate the update. If anything goes wrong you can restore the whole state of the filesystem to the snapshot time.<p>This has saved me when a nextcloud update went wrong and basically trashed my installation. No worries: I shut down everything, unmounted the filesystem ("dataset", in zfs parlance) and roll-back the filesystem.