zfs VS swift-distributed-actors

https://openzfsonosx.org is a great starting place for general ZFS on Mac stuff.

I am imaging the following simple situation. I am using open ZFS on macOS (OpenZFS on OS X), and I have created a zpool with a single external USB drive. What command should I run when the drive is accidentally disconnected without properly exporting the pool?

This is completely wrong. ZFS works very well via O3X [0]. I ran my home folder off of ZFS on various Mac Pros for ~11 years. ZFS works well in Linux and FreeBSD as well.

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0: https://openzfsonosx.org/

This might be able to read the drive https://openzfsonosx.org/ But I don't know if Time Machine will jive with it.

After dabbling with early stuff from the sadly scrapped Apple effort, I started my full time Mac ZFS journey in 2011 with the then Z-410, which then became ZEVO which was 10.8 only, and then staying on that (and in turn 10.8 doho) on a Mac Pro 3,1 for a solid 4 years or so. I was really sad when that effort didn't pan out and the company got acquired and then the whole deal was killed, but O3X revived the torch and I moved directly onto that. I've carried my pool forward continuously the whole way, with snapshots and everything, all data scrubbed and known good with no more data rot. It's a damn shame events (software patents) conspired to keep that from becoming a universal native fs, but it's still a wonderful thing and Lundman's amazing consistent efforts have been fantastic. The main site at https://openzfsonosx.org/ has decently active forums for something niche.

Without Apple on board or a much bigger effort ZFS on the Mac will probably always have some real limitations particularly with the GUI. For one of my desktop systems I've migrated to running my home and data folders as HFS or APFS formatted iSCSI targets, so it's still on ZFS underneath but appears native to macOS (and that also means that the effective death of towers isn't a limit on storage). But this remains an incredible project IMO.

Also for anyone who wants some limited GUI interaction capability, there is a small project called ZetaWatch [0] which will put some ZFS control into a menubar widget.

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0: https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/

OpenZFS is available for MacOS and it's about as rock solid as you get in a file system. As a bonus, if you someday need to migrate the dataset to a server, you'll be able to import the zfs pool pretty easily.

Check out https://openzfsonosx.org/

Site ZFS on OSX seems down for the last few days...

>such as ZFS

FWIW, ZFS has actually been available on macOS for a long time in various iterations (MacZFS, Z-410/ZEVO, and now OpenZFS [0]). I ran it for around 11 years on a number of systems with almost all of my data on it (home folder, applications, /opt for MacPorts etc) and it was a tank. Fun project and well worth checking out. I'll always regret the various factors that meant Apple didn't adopt it as their native FS.

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0: https://openzfsonosx.org/

Pretty exited for this. Looks like a good alternative to Erlang or Akka with the native performance / low resource utilization of Swift. Erlang lacks strong typing and Akka is DSL-hell.

Looks like they've open-sourced a transport [0] and are adding support for distributed tracing as well [1, 2], which is a huge aid for system operators and debugging.

[0] https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/

Apple is in the business of selling hardware, and developing a cross-platform toolkit would have to potential to cannibalize that. I think Swift's weak footing in other OSs is also owed to that fact.

Apple's best bet is to create an ecosystem of hardware and software that is self-sustaining and moated. I'd argue that they are successful in that, but all those web platforms have significantly weakened the moat. You don't need apps like Sketch anymore (infact I consider Figma way superior), and you don't need most of their bundled native apps anymore (their are great replacements that are either native or web based).

So how will they strengthen the moat? Certainly not by further weakening it by sharing code with other platforms. They seem to be ready to accept that distributed systems won't go away and are obviously actively buying into that space (https://github.com/apple/swift-distributed-actors/). But, UI-wise, I'm only seeing renewed determination to push native apps: https://www.imore.com/apple-rebuilding-apple-music-native-ap.... And I think it makes sense for their bread-and-butter hardware business.