ZFS (Zeta filesystem), according to Sun the "last word in filesystems", is definitively a great piece of software. It frees us sysadmins from the burden to plan upfront how to partition a disk, makes backups so much easier due to snapshots, allows space efficient storage thanks to optional compression support and is very safe in terms of data corruption (at least it detects corruption) and it’s quickly online again after a crash. But is it really the "last word in filesystems"?

Well, it will be successful, no question. FreeBSD has it, Solaris of course, Apple too, and it’s planned for NetBSD. Don’t know about Linux (licensing issues) and Windows.

DragonFly’s HammerFS is progressing well and will be available in an alpha version with the next release of DragonFlyBSD which is planned to be out around by mid of February. First interest was shown to port it over to NetBSD (in userland using puffs), which is great news because NetBSD is still more widely used than DragonFly and just runs on more hardware (at least DragonFly still doesn’t run on my new laptop).

So what’s so great about HammerFS?

• Infinite snapshots.

  You don’t need to manually take snapshots. The system is able keep a history of every change according to a retention policy that you can specify.

• As-of mounts

  You can mount a filesystem or access a file as-of a specific point in time (in the past). What was the content of this file yesterday? Last week? Even atime and mtime is tracked.

• Clustered

  The major goal of HammerFS is clustering. A HammerFS filesystem can be shared by a bunch of machines. No need of a single master. Based on a Chorum protocol. (this is currently not implemented)

• Backups made easy

  Three things make backups easy. First, the as-of feature (eases taking tarballs). Second, journaling. And third, clustering. Do you need to backup at all if three or more machines have an identical copy of your filesystem including history? Think about the hurdles when restoring a traditional backup. With HammerFS you simply replace the harddisk and reconnect the machine to the network. Done! Think about a malicious or stupid (like me sometimes) user deleting files accidentially, right before the next backup is taken. You will loose your work, unless you use something like HammerFS. ZFS doesn’t help here because it doesn’t has the infinite snapshot feature. While I trust harddisks and RAIDs, I don’t trust users!

• File database

  HammerFS will allow you to open a file in DB mode. I don’t know how exactly this works out, but you will be able to use a file as a simple key/value database. No need for special libraries and probably quite fast.