Ditto Blocks with zfs

More cool bits from zfs:

After writing this code and testing it, I thought what fun it would be to see it in action on my laptop. I created a new storage pool using a slice on my laptop drive, put a bunch of data on there, then wiped clean the first 1GB of that slice. As you might imagine, any of the file blocks that were unlucky enough to be allocated in that first 1GB were unreadable. However, I could still navigate the entire filesystem, typing “ls”, “rm” and creating new files as much as I wanted. Pretty damn sweet. ZFS just survived a failure scenario that would send any other filesystem to tape. I know you’d have to still go to tape for the file contents that were damaged, but the filesystem was still 100% usable and I could get a list of files that were damaged by running zpool status -v. For the careful reader, you’ll note that this command currently only give you the object number, but it will give you the actual filename in the near future.

They have been working on this for all data and it is now in b61. Google filesystem on your desktop.

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