What ZFS means for Leopard and you
By Triston McIntyre
If you’re wondering what really is all that exciting about Leopard over Tiger, you obviously haven’t received the memo on ZFS file systems, which will be implemented in Leopard. ZFS aims to completely revolutionize the way users think of storage forever.
Let’s take a second to think about what we know to be storage today: You have a drive, that gets labeled, and you can store files on it, right? If you want more storage, you add another drive. If you lose files on one drive, they get corrupted, or the hard drive just plain poops out, you’re out of luck. Kaput. Finished.
Unfortunately, that’s what the computing world has known to this point: the C: drive, all those other extensions, so on and so forth.
ZFS aims to revolutionize all that. Instead of individual drives that need to be individually managed, ZFS establishes a “pool” in which all your drives equally manage all your stored information. Gone is the day of individual drive management.
What some fans might not know is that the whole concept of “Time Machine” is completely dependent on ZFS; see, what ZFS does natively is instead of overwriting files when you save a new iteration, it saves the original and the new file. That allows users to go access those old files without having to worry about touching new files, or “losing” files. Really all Time Machine will do is provide an application to browse the directory of indexed files ZFS naturally stores. Cool, eh?
I don’t want to sound like I’m doing PR-work for Apple though; if there is a drawback to this style of formatting, it is very space-consuming. Yes, you will never have to worry about losing work, but you also will need more than an 80 gig hard drive on your Macbook. Be prepared to have a decent amount of external storage to use ZFS like it needs to be used.
Back to the positives: instead of using install disks to revert to older versions of your OS, you could simply choose it as a previous file type and load from there. Now, all that storage that is painstakingly being managed will now easily be networked under ZFS.
In short, be prepared to completely change the way you think about storage. Your life is going to be much, much easier with Leopard. Isn’t that slightly more exciting than a 3-D dock?
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on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 8:29 am
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October 12th, 2007
Emmm… Not sure where you’ve been, but ZFS is going to have only very limited read-only support in Leopard, at least when it first comes out. Time Machine will work fine without it.
October 17th, 2007
I’ve been doing snapshot backups with rsync and hard links for a while now - this is essentially what Time Machine is doing - no ZFS required.
Hooray for the first backup utility that average-Joe-types will actually use!
October 30th, 2007
Why do people always insist on making things up to sound hip? You don’t have to lie to hang, man, but please don’t spew a bunch of misinformation.
You don’t have the first clue about ZFS. If you did you would have known ever since time machine was previewed that it did not use ZFS. Time Machine uses a BACKUP DISK to backup it’s files. ZFS can only create snapshots INSIDE THE POOL.
Who lets you write this junk? Get a clue.