Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

New to OpenZFS on OS X (Or ZFS in general)? Ask your questions here!

Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

Postby sifar » Fri Feb 05, 2021 12:10 pm

Goal: To ensure easy migration of personal data (along with metadata) when changing operating systems, by using OpenZFS.

I had to stop using Linux to use some non-Linux apps and had switched to Windows. After Microsoft introduced forced updates and increased spying on its users in Windows, I migrated to macOS in the hopes things would be better in that ecosystem. But they too have been increasingly abusing our user trust on privacy, with the latest action being introducing a backdoor in macOS Big Sur's network API's that allow select Apple software to bypass all application firewalls to aid their data collection and spying. As such, I am yet again forced to consider migrating to Linux or FreeBSD in the future.

After past experiences with different OSes, I had opted to using a lot of multi-platform opensource applications to ensure switching to another OS is as painless as possible. I now want to consider OpenZFS too for this same purpose.

The basic idea is to use the default OS filesystem in the system disk (a small 128 GB SSD drive that will have whatever OS and all applications), and use another internal hard-disk with ZFS filesystem to store all user (application) and personal data. I will also have multiple external hard disk, again with ZFS, to take backups and store unimportant media files.

To this end, I have the following doubts:

  1. Is this idea flawed in any way?
  2. I know OpenZFS supports compression and encryption. Does it support tagging or labeling files and directories, like HFS+ or NTFS does?
  3. Does the OpenZFS driver add support for this tagging or labeling in the respective file browsers of the OS (e.g. Explorer or Finder)?
  4. How much of the OpenZFS is GUI driven and integrated with the OS (e.g. formatting a drive using macOS Disk Utility)?
  5. How much attention does OpenZFS need after the first setup?

(I am posting here because I am still using macOS Mojave and plan to stick with it till Apple drops support for it and stops the security update. So my first experiments with OpenZFS will be on macOS).
sifar
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2021 10:57 am

Re: Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

Postby jawbroken » Sat Feb 06, 2021 2:42 am

sifar wrote:But they too have been increasingly abusing our user trust on privacy, with the latest action being introducing a backdoor in macOS Big Sur's network API's that allow select Apple software to bypass all application firewalls to aid their data collection and spying.

This was a workaround for a bug and has already been fixed.
jawbroken
 
Posts: 61
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2015 4:46 am

Re: Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

Postby sifar » Sat Feb 06, 2021 3:13 am

jawbroken wrote:This was a workaround for a bug and has already been fixed.


What a convenient "bug" (with its own whitelist too!) that allowed Apple apps to deliberately bypass any application firewall that used its API (which again, they forced all the firewall to use)! Just like the past "bug" with ios updates that suddenly changes your preferences by enabling all your apps to use iCloud or allow location tracking ... Funny how all these "bugs" suddenly allow Apple to access our private data, even if we explicitly try to prevent that. (Sorry about the sarcasm, but I am done with believing that any corporates really cares about my privacy.)
sifar
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2021 10:57 am

Re: Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

Postby nodarkthings » Sat Feb 06, 2021 3:24 am

Being a basic ZFS user, my answers are limited and must be considered "AFAIK" and openzfsonosx only... :oops:
2. & 3. ZFS has no integrated tagging and labeling, it relies on the Finder. So, that will probably be one limit for your plans, except if you find a cross-platform labeling app.
4. None. All commands are made in Terminal (though there are some third party utilities that have tried to build a GUI, I never used them nor don't know if they are still in development)
5. Quite none. Usually, once all's setup it's ok. But it can happen that a pool won't mount for whatever reason (coming back from a different OS is one), so I always have my ZFS AppleScripts at hand (mount/unmount all pools).
So
1. The most important part is setting things up the right way for your use case.
Take in consideration that ZFS is maybe more suited for things like RAID, big data and not common personal computing — though I use it like that myself... :mrgreen:
My opinion, being an all times mac user, is that it was a nice addition to HFS+ but it might be more balanced now that APFS is a thing.
I'm a big fan of the "mountpoints", that allows you to mount a dataset anywhere in your file tree.
And it certainly is a good idea to have your data on a different drive than your OS.
Some people put the Users folder on a ZFS pool but I'm not fond of that as it has some limitation (the pool must be mounted prior to login, so some had issues with the autologin feature of MacOS), but that's not your goal anyway.
nodarkthings
 
Posts: 174
Joined: Mon Jan 26, 2015 10:32 am

Re: Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

Postby jawbroken » Sat Feb 06, 2021 5:03 am

sifar wrote:What a convenient "bug" (with its own whitelist too!) that allowed Apple apps to deliberately bypass any application firewall that used its API (which again, they forced all the firewall to use)!


I think you've misinterpreted what I said. They were deliberately whitelisted to work around a bug with the new API, which has since been fixed. I'm happy for you to believe in conspiracies, though.
jawbroken
 
Posts: 61
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2015 4:46 am

Re: Becoming OS Independent with OpenZFS

Postby sifar » Wed Feb 10, 2021 10:47 am

ZFS has no integrated tagging and labeling, it relies on the Finder.


Is there a way to extend ZFS to also store tags / labels as a metadata of a file / directory? (I'd rather depend on the filesystem to do this than an os-dependent file browser; and I really like using tags / labels to add more info to organise files / directories.)
sifar
 
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Feb 05, 2021 10:57 am


Return to Absolute Beginners Section

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 14 guests