[colug-432] Install and Manually Partition Debian

[Brian Miller]

On 03/15/2014 10:40 AM, George Larson wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 15, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Richard Hornsby
> <richardjhornsby at gmail.com> wrote:
>> not familiar with ZFS.  What are the advantages?
>
>
> Great question.  Hopefully there's someone here with the ability to
> answer it?  (:  I just don't know, I've not used LVM enough to give
> any fair comparison.  My DIY appliances (e.g., firewall and NAS) run
> FreeBSD and I use GNU/Linux for my day-to-day.  I've used ZFS with
> FreeNAS.
>
> Also, I've used it at work to store my dev. database.  I can take a
> snapshot.  Test a process that makes a lot of changes to data that are
> interdependent with other data, cascading out in a way that would be
> nightmarish to track manually.  Then I can look at the data and go
> "Well, that's not exactly what I wanted." and return to my snapshot.
>
> This guy has a list.  Might be a good list?  :D
>
> [  http://www.unixconsult.org/zfs_vs_lvm.html  ]
>

zfs is basically a whole disk LVM.  No need to create a separate /boot 
partition.  You can also "oversubscribe" the disk, too.  If you have a 
100 GB disk, you can create 3 mount points, each 50 GB in size.  The 
down side is that you can run out of disk space if something gets out of 
hand.  You can also delegate disk management of a portion of the total 
disk to a non-admin, without giving access manange all of the disk.  My 
experience with zfs is on Solaris, so it might be a little different 
than on BSD.  I believe btrfs is suppose to be the Linux equivalent of zfs.