Our great sponsors
-
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
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.
----
0: https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/
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.
----
0: https://github.com/cbreak-black/ZetaWatch/
I think I had basically an identical journey to you, through the same ZFS versions. Zevo was really exciting at the time to have a professional looking org behind it, and they came out with a real Sys Prefs plug-in and everything. They'd hired one of the Apple file system devs too.
I even wrote my own menu-bar tool way back when - https://github.com/alexwasserman/ZFSStatusScript
Was 8 years ago - no idea if it still works. A while back I moved to just running ZFS on my home lab machines and then exporting over the network to use as necessary.