I have recently reformatted my personal backup drive with ZFS, in order to use it with Linux and MacOsX and played back our family photos on it. This pool was made from linux-side.
Then, I reformatted a spare partition on my end 2013 MBP (Catalina) with ZFS (1.9.4), made from mac-side, and copied the photos over, for use with Apple Photos. Unfortunately, I am not sure, but I suspect I copied it using zfs send/receive from the linux-ZFS-formatted backup drive and that might have caused problems.
Everything was fine for maybe 2 weeks, but then ZFS complained about corruption. I ran scrub and it identified a long list of corrupted "files", with garbage file names.
I might have forgotten to export the pool manually during reboots (which might have happened only a handful of times at most), but I do not believe a zfs pool would crash that way because of that.
I tried to force import the pool a couple of times, but was unsuccessful. I also tried
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zpool clear -F zimagepool
cannot open 'zimagepool': no such pool
Now, I am no longer able to import the pool at all using zpool import, but strangely, the partition is auto-mounted by macos as msdos partition with garbage names and I can even cd into that mysteriously mounted Volume. I guess this only has deteriorated corruption.
I now tried to boot ubuntu 21 on my mac which gave the following results:
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root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# zpool import
no pools available to import
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# zpool import -d /dev/sda5
pool: zimagepool
id: 4626414534438887032
state: ONLINE
status: The pool was last accessed by another system.
action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier and
the '-f' flag.
see: https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/msg/ZFS-8000-EY
config:
zimagepool ONLINE
sda5 ONLINE
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# zpool import zimagepool
cannot import 'zimagepool': no such pool available
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# zpool import 4626414534438887032
cannot import '4626414534438887032': no such pool available
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# zpool import -f 4626414534438887032
cannot import '4626414534438887032': no such pool available
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# man zpool import
root@ubuntu:/home/ubuntu# zpool import -F 4626414534438887032
cannot import '4626414534438887032': no such pool available
May
The problem now is not data loss, since this was just restored from backup anyway. My problem is, that I now have lost my trust in openzfsonosx and I don't dare to even mount the ZFS-backup drive, because if it corrupts that one, that would be desastrous.
The only safe-enough way I see to use the backup-drive with my mac is only indirectly via smb share, served from a separate linux-laptop connected to the drive. I don't trust it enough to even import readOnly.
Can anyone comment what might have caused the corruption and what I have to consider when using ZFS for mac and linux ?
Thanks for any hints...
Ingvar