# ZFS 289 Hacker News commenters recommended ZFS and 56 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 10 years (27 owners). It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Recommended for cheap snapshots, replication and checksumming that catches and repairs corruption, with long-term reliability; caveats are Linux licensing/integration friction and caching or performance quirks. ## Why people recommend it - Instant snapshots and quick restores (8 comments): "Having each boot environment available as a ZFS snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful feature." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400781)) "Creating snapshots and sending them is efficient enough to use it as the underlying storage for moderately loaded databases and VMs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854954)) "I can't count the amount of times i have wiped or edited something by mistake and then restored it within seconds with it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48367184)) - Detects and repairs data corruption (5 comments): "I've tested my own machines running ZFS by random writes out of band from the filesystem/kernel and it has always found and fixed them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770054)) "The contents, whether old and stale or brand new, can (and should) be read routinely and checksummed to confirm integrity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913214)) "if anything, having a copy-on-write filesystem like ZFS on your firewall/router means you have better integrity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46046765)) - Rock-solid over many years (6 comments): "in that time I've always able to wrest the system back into order even on the seemingly most-unlikely, least-resilient, garbage-tier hardware" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46044731)) "As someone who originally ran it on Solaris when it came out ~20 years ago, and have continued to run it on FreeBSD and Linux" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49663714)) "Run ZFS backed filestore on FreeBSD, have migrated it to/from Debian. Over 15 years, on over 50 hosts/NAS/SAN instances" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48827721)) - Efficient send/receive replication (3 comments): "Having each boot environment available as a ZFS snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful feature." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47400781)) "Creating snapshots and sending them is efficient enough to use it as the underlying storage for moderately loaded databases and VMs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854954)) "ZFS incremental replication on top of regular app backups provide a quick recovery process should the hardware of that machine fail." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47740929)) ## What people warn about - Linux licensing and kernel friction (4 comments): "ZFS is out because the Linux developers refuse to cooperate by providing the hooks it would need to avoid duplicating the disk cache." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660598)) "I had ZoL ZFS troubles that the maintainers shrugged off requiring transferring everything to another volume" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47723074)) "Given the license issue with zfs - and in particular, the technical fallout like needing dkms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49717550)) - Double caching and fragmentation (2 comments): "ZFS is out because the Linux developers refuse to cooperate by providing the hooks it would need to avoid duplicating the disk cache." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660598)) "ZFS does double caching and doesn't have a way to consolidate extents except to rebuild the FS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46105935)) - Bugs in encryption and spacemaps (3 comments): "encrypted ZFS was not considered production due to obscure file corruption bugs that were unpatched" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49496684)) "there have been a number of bugs where ZFS panics because the spacemaps say something insane" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692641)) "very old versions of ZFS appear to have quietly written slightly incorrect ACL information" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46692032)) - Confusing docs and troubleshooting (2 comments): "whenever I've tried to learn more or troubleshoot an issue like the performance degradation I'm experiencing now, I'm met with confusing viewpoints and documentation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845344)) "the challenge was the boot sequence required for a custom kernel and rootfs was pretty non-transparent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123299)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Btrfs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/btrfs.md): 105 recommend - [FUSE](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fuse.md): 18 recommend - [sshfs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sshfs.md): 17 recommend - [tmpfs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tmpfs.md): 5 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "ZFS", https://hackerapproved.com/p/zfs/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).