You might look at UFS Explorer. It claims to have ZFS support now. It costs
money for a license and I think required windows last I used it. I can attest
that a previous version allowed me to recover all the data I needed from a lost
UFS mirror almost a decade ago.
Sent from my iPhone
> On May 7, 2019, at 9:01 PM, Michelle Sullivan <miche...@sorbs.net> wrote:
>
> Karl Denninger wrote:
>>> On 5/7/2019 00:02, Michelle Sullivan wrote:
>>> The problem I see with that statement is that the zfs dev mailing lists
>>> constantly and consistently following the line of, the data is always right
>>> there is no need for a “fsck” (which I actually get) but it’s used to shut
>>> down every thread... the irony is I’m now installing windows 7 and SP1 on a
>>> usb stick (well it’s actually installed, but sp1 isn’t finished yet) so I
>>> can install a zfs data recovery tool which reports to be able to “walk the
>>> data” to retrieve all the files... the irony eh... install windows7 on a
>>> usb stick to recover a FreeBSD installed zfs filesystem... will let you
>>> know if the tool works, but as it was recommended by a dev I’m hopeful...
>>> have another array (with zfs I might add) loaded and ready to go... if the
>>> data recovery is successful I’ll blow away the original machine and work
>>> out what OS and drive setup will be safe for the data in the future. I
>>> might even put FreeBSD and zfs back on it, but if I do it won’t be in the
>>> current Zraid2 config.
>> Meh.
>>
>> Hardware failure is, well, hardware failure. Yes, power-related
>> failures are hardware failures.
>>
>> Never mind the potential for /software /failures. Bugs are, well,
>> bugs. And they're a real thing. Never had the shortcomings of UFS bite
>> you on an "unexpected" power loss? Well, I have. Is ZFS absolutely
>> safe against any such event? No, but it's safe*r*.
>
> Yes and no ... I'll explain...
>
>>
>> I've yet to have ZFS lose an entire pool due to something bad happening,
>> but the same basic risk (entire filesystem being gone)
>
> Everytime I have seen this issue (and it's been more than once - though until
> now recoverable - even if extremely painful) - its always been during a
> resilver of a failed drive and something happening... panic, another drive
> failure, power etc.. any other time its rock solid... which is the yes and
> no... under normal circumstances zfs is very very good and seems as safe as
> or safer than UFS... but my experience is ZFS has one really bad flaw.. if
> there is a corruption in the metadata - even if the stored data is 100%
> correct - it will fault the pool and thats it it's gone barring some luck and
> painful recovery (backups aside) ... this other file systems also suffer but
> there are tools that *majority of the time* will get you out of the s**t with
> little pain. Barring this windows based tool I haven't been able to run yet,
> zfs appears to have nothing.
>
>> has occurred more
>> than once in my IT career with other filesystems -- including UFS, lowly
>> MSDOS and NTFS, never mind their predecessors all the way back to floppy
>> disks and the first 5Mb Winchesters.
>
> Absolutely, been there done that.. and btrfs...*ouch* still as bad.. however
> with the only one btrfs install I had (I didn't knopw it was btrfs
> underneath, but netgear NAS...) I was still able to recover the data even
> though it had screwed the file system so bad I vowed never to consider or use
> it again on anything ever...
>
>>
>> I learned a long time ago that two is one and one is none when it comes
>> to data, and WHEN two becomes one you SWEAT, because that second failure
>> CAN happen at the worst possible time.
>
> and does..
>
>>
>> As for RaidZ2 .vs. mirrored it's not as simple as you might think.
>> Mirrored vdevs can only lose one member per mirror set, unless you use
>> three-member mirrors. That sounds insane but actually it isn't in
>> certain circumstances, such as very-read-heavy and high-performance-read
>> environments.
>
> I know - this is why I don't use mirrored - because wear patterns will ensure
> both sides of the mirror are closely matched.
>
>>
>> The short answer is that a 2-way mirrored set is materially faster on
>> reads but has no acceleration on writes, and can lose one member per
>> mirror. If the SECOND one fails before you can resilver, and that
>> resilver takes quite a long while if the disks are large, you're dead.
>> However, if you do six drives as a 2x3 way mirror (that is, 3 vdevs each
>> of a 2-way mirror) you now have three parallel data paths going at once
>> and potentially six for reads -- and performance is MUCH better. A
>> 3-way mirror can lose two members (and could be organized as 3x2) but
>> obviously requires lots of drive slots, 3x as much *power* per gigabyte
>> stored (and you pay for power twice; once to buy it and again to get the
>> heat out of the room where the machine is.)
>
> my problem (as always) is slots not so much the power.
>
>>
>> Raidz2 can also lose 2 drives without being dead. However, it doesn't
>> get any of the read performance improvement *and* takes a write
>> performance penalty; Z2 has more write penalty than Z1 since it has to
>> compute and write two parity entries instead of one, although in theory
>> at least it can parallel those parity writes -- albeit at the cost of
>> drive bandwidth congestion (e.g. interfering with other accesses to the
>> same disk at the same time.) In short RaidZx performs about as "well"
>> as the *slowest* disk in the set.
> Which is why I built mine with identical drives (though different production
> batches :) ) ... majority of the data in my storage array is write once (or
> twice) read many.
>
>> So why use it (particularly Z2) at
>> all? Because for "N" drives you get the protection of a 3-way mirror
>> and *much* more storage. A six-member RaidZ2 setup returns ~4Tb of
>> usable space, where with a 2-way mirror it returns 3Tb and a 3-way
>> mirror (which provides the same protection against drive failure as Z2)
>> you have only *half* the storage. IMHO ordinary Raidz isn't worth the
>> trade-offs, but Z2 frequently is.
>>
>> In addition more spindles means more failures, all other things being
>> equal, so if you need "X" TB of storage and organize it as 3-way mirrors
>> you now have twice as many physical spindles which means on average
>> you'll take twice as many faults. If performance is more important then
>> the choice is obvious. If density is more important (that is, a lot or
>> even most of the data is rarely accessed at all) then the choice is
>> fairly simple too. In many workloads you have some of both, and thus
>> the correct choice is a hybrid arrangement; that's what I do here,
>> because I have a lot of data that is rarely-to-never accessed and
>> read-only but also have some data that is frequently accessed and
>> frequently written. One size does not fit all in such a workload.
> This is where I came to 2 systems (with different data) .. one was for
> density, the other performance. Storage vs working etc..
>
>> MOST systems, by the way, have this sort of paradigm (a huge percentage
>> of the data is rarely read and never written) but it doesn't become
>> economic or sane to try to separate them until you get well into the
>> terabytes of storage range and a half-dozen or so physical volumes.
>> There's a very clean argument that prior to that point but with greater
>> than one drive mirrored is always the better choice.
>>
>> Note that if you have an *adapter* go insane (and as I've noted here
>> I've had it happen TWICE in my IT career!) then *all* of the data on the
>> disks served by that adapter is screwed.
>
> 100% with you - been there done that... and it doesn't matter what os or
> filesystem, hardware failure where silent data corruption happens because of
> an adapter will always take you out (and zfs will not save you in many cases
> of that either.)
>>
>> It doesn't make a bit of difference what filesystem you're using in that
>> scenario and thus you had better have a backup scheme and make sure it
>> works as well, never mind software bugs or administrator stupidity ("dd"
>> as root to the wrong target, for example, will reliably screw you every
>> single time!)
>>
>> For a single-disk machine ZFS is no *less* safe than UFS and provides a
>> number of advantages, with arguably the most-important being easily-used
>> snapshots.
>
> Depends in normal operating I agree... but when it comes to all or nothing,
> that is a matter of perspective. Personally I prefer to have in place
> recovery options and/or multiple *possible* recovery options rather than ...
> "destroy the pool and recreate it from scratch, hope you have backups"...
>
>> Not only does this simplify backups since coherency during
>> the backup is never at issue and incremental backups become fast and
>> easily-done in addition boot environments make roll-forward and even
>> *roll-back* reasonable to implement for software updates -- a critical
>> capability if you ever run an OS version update and something goes
>> seriously wrong with it. If you've never had that happen then consider
>> yourself blessed;
>
> I have been there (especially in the early days (pre 0.83 kernel) versions of
> Linux :) )
>
>> it's NOT fun to manage in a UFS environment and often
>> winds up leading to a "restore from backup" scenario. (To be fair it
>> can be with ZFS too if you're foolish enough to upgrade the pool before
>> being sure you're happy with the new OS rev.)
>>
> Actually I have a simple way with UFS (and ext2/3/4 etc) ... split the boot
> disk almost down the center.. create 3 partitions.. root, swap, altroot.
> root and altroot are almost identical, one is always active, new OS goes on
> the other, switch to make the other active (primary) when you've tested...
> it's only gives one level of roll forward/roll back, but it works for me and
> has never failed (boot disk/OS wise) since I implemented it... but then I
> don't let anyone else in the company have root access so they cannot dd or
> "rm -r . /" or "rm -r .*" (both of which are the only way I have done that
> before - back in 1994 and never done it since - its something you learn or
> get out of IT :P .. and for those who didn't get the latter it should have
> been 'rm -r .??*' - and why are you on '-stable' ...? :P )
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Michelle Sullivan
> http://www.mhix.org/
>
>
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