Snapshots with LVM still imply a relatively costly(?) quiescing of the filesystem for however long it takes to complete pending writes and perform the snapshot. This is certainly my experience with snapshots on UFS2 - they're supported, but you're not going to be too pleased performing them automatically from a cronjob every 15 minutes.
Snapshots can also be promoted to fully-fledged filesystems using cloning, which is very handy for spawning off fully-featured jail environments and for setting up boot environments for a host.
Filesystem replication. My primary backups involve using `zfs send` to maintain remote copies of my snapshots on another machine with minimal cost in bandwidth and disk IO.
Filesystem compression. My root pool is just 0.63x the size it would have been thanks to lz4, basically for free.
As X-Isence says, end-to-end data protection. Every bit of data and metadata are checksummed so any errors are detected, and if possible automatically repaired. Crucial metadata is duplicated even on single-disk configurations.
Copy-on-write semantics make for more robustness in face of problems - active data is never overwritten in-place. This also makes for much safer parity RAID than traditional approaches.
Snapshots can also be promoted to fully-fledged filesystems using cloning, which is very handy for spawning off fully-featured jail environments and for setting up boot environments for a host.
Filesystem replication. My primary backups involve using `zfs send` to maintain remote copies of my snapshots on another machine with minimal cost in bandwidth and disk IO.
Filesystem compression. My root pool is just 0.63x the size it would have been thanks to lz4, basically for free.
As X-Isence says, end-to-end data protection. Every bit of data and metadata are checksummed so any errors are detected, and if possible automatically repaired. Crucial metadata is duplicated even on single-disk configurations.
Copy-on-write semantics make for more robustness in face of problems - active data is never overwritten in-place. This also makes for much safer parity RAID than traditional approaches.