SIsirn·May 6, 2021
I hosted my coding environment on a VPS running FreeBSD and happen to jump between VPS provider quite a bit due to location and pricing. My migration method was simply:
$ zfs snapshot zroot/home@migrate
$ zfs send -R zroot/home@migrate | ssh newhost zfs recv zroot/home
ZFS automatic snapshots (via zfstools[1]) can also saved hours of headaches trying to recover an older version of a file. Since snapshot appears as a regular mount (ZFS even automatically expose them under /path/to/mount/.zfs/snapshot), all existing tooling just works (cp, cat, running diff against snapshot, etc.).
My Linux machine these days also runs ZFS, but the level of integration with the system is still far from that of FreeBSD's. That can range from something as simple as ZFS ARC stats in top, to native support for ZFS Boot Environment allowing the system t
Read the rest
o boot directly from snapshots or do an offline upgrade of a clone of a live system[2]. (On Linux side of things there's zfsbootmenu[3] which provides something similar but the project is still quite new.)
The filesystem may not matter that much, and I'm sure many these features can be replicated with LVM, but having a unified tooling and community around it really makes quite a difference in quality of life as an end-user.
[1]: https://github.com/bdrewery/zfstools
[2]: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2021/02/23/upgrade-freebsd-wi...
[3]: https://zfsbootmenu.org/