openzfs VS openzfs

Heads up, installing both WinBTRFS and OpenZFS on Windows may have problems:

"Win OpenZFS driver and WinBtrfs driver dont play well with each other"

https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs/issues/364

I tried it a few months ago and ReFS ate my data. No indication of why in event logs or SMART data. It had IsPowerProtected set because I have a UPS and I had a unclean restart, I would expect it to lose data, but not to corrupt the filesystem metadata. I had a backup of the data but wanted some recent changes. Refsutil (the official Microsoft tool) didn't help because it has not been updated for the newest ReFS version. I couldn't read most files because I had integrity enable and files failed the check. Hetman's Data Recovery was able to recover most of the data. In later testing I found out that IsPowerProtected is just very unsafe. I have since put some time into testing and sometimes fixing https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs , it is not ready for use yet, but it is making great progress.

Windows lacks support in the same sense that Linux lacks support; there are external projects implementing it for both, though I believe the Windows port is less polished. (Some people are running it in production, though...)

This is really cool and speaks to the modularity of the Windows file system stack. I love projects that customize Windows (working against its closed-source nature).

There’s an OpenZFA port to Windows[0]. I wonder if my hopes of having ZFS on Windows (including the boot drive, because I would love to be able to snapshot and rollback) would actually be possible.

[0] https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs

*cough* it can, but... no idea how well it works but it seems a bit hacky.

If you have not used it, maybe the native ZFS port for windows could be an easier solution.

Theoretically ZFS is ported to windows, but I heard that it is not really stable yet.

I did use the packages provided here: https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/openzfs/releases/tag/zfswin-2.1.6rc2

I've used OpenZFS on OSX (https://github.com/openzfsonosx/openzfs#readme) and it's been better to me for cross-os drive sharing than NTFS or UFS, despite their warnings about using it on USB devices

I hear you about a ZFS root partition, though

Maybe OpenZFS but you need to know what you're doing, my advice is to use a VM to access the EXT4 partition then use the VM to transfer data, use a friendlier' FS like exFAT/FAT32 or use a network storage protocol like SMB/NFS etc. (that needs an additional system like a pi4 or something.)