

Mac OS X - The state of the file system (2011) - laurent123456
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/07/mac-os-x-10-7/12/#file-system

======
dshep
Just today I ran DiskUtil and verify disk told me my disk needed to be
repaired, but I needed to do that by rebooting into recovery mode and running
DiskUtil there. So I do that and it tells me my disk can't be repaired, back
up what data I can, and restore my disk. Awesome right. Ran verify disk again
and it says the disk is fine... Fine!? You just told me it needed to be
repaired and you couldn't repair it. And now its ok. Who knows if I just lost
a bunch of data or what. Fortunately I have a backup.

Please Apple give us ZFS so we can all sleep at night.

------
noinsight
> Corruption in file data is arguably worse because it's much more likely to
> go undetected. Over time, it can propagate into all your backups. When it's
> finally discovered, perhaps years later when looking at old baby pictures,
> it's too late to do anything about it

This applies to every OS I guess (except with ZFS or BTRFS)? This is my
biggest concern currently. I'm mostly using one drive with ext4 that I back up
from time to time, what if the files silently corrupt and it propagates to my
backups, I wouldn't notice until it's too late probably. I guess rsync
wouldn't sync the wrong data unless the files have changed since it syncs
based on modification stamps. Investing into a proper RAID or ZFS is
"expensive". I'm so paranoid about this I'm probably going to do it at some
point.

------
AdamN
So sad. We've been waiting for ZFS (or similar) for years now to no avail.
It's one of those things that you know Apple engineers are hitting their head
about but there's so much legacy code keeping them on HFS+ that they need some
real institutional push to get things ported.

------
terhechte
For the adventurous, there's Zevo [1] which is a port of ZFS to Mac OS X that
supports all the fine grained details of the operating system:

"ZEVO’s file system is fully integrated into the Mac’s unique OS environment
and implements quotas, ACLs, and the HFS+ programming interfaces like search-
fs, id lookups, bulk access calls and resource fork stream access."

If I remember it correctly, the company is run by the guy that was responsible
for the ZFS-Mac OS X integration at Apple that was canned shortly before 10.6
was released.

[1]
[http://getgreenbytes.com/solutions/zevo/](http://getgreenbytes.com/solutions/zevo/)

~~~
rentzsch
Sadly ZEVO looks to be in trouble, if not dead [1]. Even Don Brady (the lead
engineer behind ZEVO) has reluctantly returned to HFS+ on 10.9 [2].

[1] [http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/64863395820/time-to-say-
goo...](http://jollyjinx.tumblr.com/post/64863395820/time-to-say-goodbye-to-
zevo-zfs-and-greenbytes)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/DonJBrady/status/393028766554812416](https://twitter.com/DonJBrady/status/393028766554812416)

------
hmottestad
Anyone know why this is being upvoted? Anything new (in 2013) that is suddenly
makes this relevant again? (ZFS changed their license? WinFS back as a
zombie?)

~~~
deong
It's not breaking news or anything, but by definition, "Mac OS filesystem
still a piece of crap" won't be.

I assume it's being upvoted because it's interesting and (apparently)
timeless.

------
laurent123456
The paragraph about the hard link errors propagating from one backup to
another in Time Machine is pretty scary.

Is there any known solution to this problem? Would running something like Disk
Util from time to time detects the errors and fix the filesystem?

~~~
deong
Depends on the cause of the corruption. If the physical drive is going bad,
then diskutil should at least report some errors. But HFS+ doesn't checksum
anything. If you have a flaky controller or just an errant solar ray flipping
a bit, there's nothing diskutil can do about it. A 0 is as valid a bit as 1,
so as far as diskutil can tell, all you did was save a change to a file
somewhere.

You can verify your time machine backups periodically though.

