ZFS incompatibility with iCloud, Dropbox

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Multiple file systems for a single home directory

Post by grahamperrin » Wed Feb 20, 2013 2:12 pm

An interesting experiment, but I should not expect OS X to work properly with that approach.

For a home directory, please use:

  • no more than one file system
  • subdirectories (not separate file systems) at the expected paths.

File System Programming Guide: File System Basics: About the OS X File System
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Re: ZFS incompatibility with iCloud, Dropbox

Post by jollyjinx » Thu Feb 21, 2013 7:14 am

Well, my main scenario for using ZFS is:

a) data integrity checks
b) to be able to create snapshots and send them to a remote site(s)

I'm sending snapshots of my sources ( I'm a developer) and snapshots of my pictures offsite, but not everything that changes.
I'm sending snapshots of the whole zfs hierarchy to a backup computer in the same local network and keep the backups depending on their content - downloads,caches and the like for a month, sources like forever.

Failing to have that ability I maybe should just drop ZFS and trust git's inherent integrity and just mourn over a few lost pictures in a few years and switch back to HFS+ on my work machine. Seems no worth the hassle if I can't use ZFS on a Mac like on other systems.
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Overview

Post by grahamperrin » Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:50 pm

I shouldn't treat this as an incompatibility with ZFS.

I would not expect OS X to work properly with a single home directory spread across multiple HFS Plus file systems …
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Re: ZFS incompatibility with iCloud, Dropbox

Post by shuman » Thu Feb 21, 2013 1:54 pm

I currently have my Music folder inside my home folder as a zfs filesystem. Haven't noticed any issues with that. Possibly might cause a problem with ~Library.
- Mac Mini (Late 2012), 10.8.5, 16GB memory, pool - 2 Mirrored 3TB USB 3.0 External Drives
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Re: Overview

Post by jollyjinx » Sun Feb 24, 2013 10:24 am

grahamperrin wrote:
I would not expect OS X to work properly with a single home directory spread across multiple HFS Plus file systems …



Why not ? I know, I've taken it to the extreme, but actually it should work. And I don't see any reason why it should not. I would like to hear what problems you see with correct behaving software.
And I know, it's not a ZFS issue directly. So maybe I should request a feaure request to only have a single mount point but multiple different subdirectories to snapshot.
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Re: ZFS incompatibility with iCloud, Dropbox

Post by BjoKa » Mon Feb 25, 2013 4:30 pm

Well, I guess OSX is simply making a lot of assumptions, and so do many applications written for MacOSX. MacOSX is designed as a system for non-technical users, running on personal computers and focused on usability for the unexperienced. As such, there was never any necessity to consider $HOME directories which spread out over multiple partitions. Since MacOSX would never create such a setup, it does not expect it. Instead, it assumes $HOME is a single file system and expects e.g. to be able to rename (hard-link) files. Not to mention the various non-POSIX APIs used by older MacOSX applications, which predates the idea of multiple filesystems.
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Link

Post by grahamperrin » Wed Feb 27, 2013 3:02 am

My comments about the home directory deserve more explanation. Please see:

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Re: ZFS incompatibility with iCloud, Dropbox

Post by mk01 » Sun Mar 03, 2013 8:41 pm

@jollyjinx: My issue with ubd process was not related to the certificates as well, but was very similar. It was not able to delete/update some data on the cloud (documents), or sync cloud with local, ending with endless loop of errors.

I checked whether I have all on cloud and deleted the sync doc dir from ~/Library folder. disabling / re-enabling cloud was not enough as well. This step is not cleaning the remote/local repository. After I deleted locally, everything synced back to local from cloud within minutes and since then all ok.

br,
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