openzfs VS quibble

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

Not in its own. You also need a different boot loader. The author has an implementation called Quibble [0] that also supports btrfs.

[0] https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble

A custom bootloader for windows that works for WinBTRFS and others may eventually allow booting on mostly/entirely ZFS instead of symlinking user folders to a dataset or whatever. If ZFS isn’t ready yet, I’ll just try WinBTRFS instead.

It's not ZFS, but let's check this with btrfs https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble

See this project: https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble/issues/2

It is technically possible, but you'll need to use an alternate boot loader for that: https://github.com/maharmstone/quibble