How safe is ZFS to use for a home user?

[Peter Schuller]

> Has anybody ever lost data due to any bugs or anything like that?  I'm
> going to use this ZFS as my primary storage medium (and poor man's
> backup solution), so I would be devastated if I lost my entire array
> due to a bug or other issue (aside from losing two hard drives in a
> three hard drive RAID-Z array).

I haven't. Haven't really seen anyone say they have either, in a way that was 
due to a ZFS bug.

I'm using it for several machines (both private and in production). Two of 
them are doing raidz2 with 5 and 6 disks respectively, another two are doing 
three-way mirroring.

Based on past experience and behavior in various edge cases (port outtages, 
crashes causing rebuilds, etc), I feel safer with ZFS than without, even if 
the implementation is not as mature as UFS. However, the fact that I "feel 
safe" is of course not very objective nor useful ;)

Just with these select few machines, I have already had snapshots save me at 
least once and checksumming "sort of" saved me once. And knowing that 'zpool 
scrub' really tests your integrity properly is *so* re-assuring I can't even 
begin to describe it.

That said, no raid/storage solution is ever going to be perfect. Insert 
standard rant about keeping backups here.

-- 
/ Peter Schuller

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