# what is the best filesystem? UFS or ZFS



## douglasfim (Feb 26, 2011)

what is the best filesystem?

I'm using *ufs*

tests *http://www.phoronix.com* left better by using the *zfs*

would somehow change the ufs to zfs without losing everything?


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## ian-nai (Feb 26, 2011)

Some good points made here:  http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20474&highlight=zfs+ufs

I think it's basically:

UFS:
-30 years of development/production (that's huge)
-low resource footprint
-works very naturally with the various GEOM tools

ZFS:
-very dynamic configuration options (aka integrated volume/pool/file system management)
-supports (virtually) infinite snapshots
-data integrity

I'd say (and risk angering the *nix demigods) that ZFS is good for file servers while UFS is good for desktop/workstation use.


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## oliverh (Feb 26, 2011)

douglasfim said:
			
		

> what is the best filesystem?
> 
> I'm using *ufs*
> 
> ...



The one, which fits your needs best. I'm using UFS and ZFS on some testing machine ...


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## hedwards (Feb 28, 2011)

It really depends what you're doing. There's nothing wrong with mix and match. Using ZFS for your backup and UFS for most other things. The main thing I personally like about ZFS is the way that it can be employed to monitor for bit rot and with ZMIRROR or RAIDZ heal those problems as they come up.

But for portions of the filesystem which are just from the standard install, you may as well just use UFS if you like and something like tripwire to monitor for corruption/changes as it's typically easy enough to get those files back.


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