zfs discuss - Dec 2005 - Advantages of zfs create over mkdir

I''m new to zfs so be kind. What is the difference/advantages or the
reasons why you would do somethink like this:
zfs create tank/home/tom
zfs create tank/home/dick
zfs create tank/home/harry 

 ie; use zfs to create the sub directories

over:

mkdir to create the sub directories?

Thanks
This message posted from opensolaris.org

On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 02:39:09PM -0800, Charles wrote:
> I''m new to zfs so be kind. What is the difference/advantages or
the
> reasons why you would do somethink like this:
> 
> zfs create tank/home/tom
> zfs create tank/home/dick
> zfs create tank/home/harry 
> 
>  ie; use zfs to create the sub directories
> 
> over:
> 
> mkdir to create the sub directories?
The main advantage is that you can look at and control the usages of
each of the home directories; instead of having to do a "du" to find
out
how much storage tom is using, "df /home/tom" will tell you directly.

You can even set quotas and reserve space for the various users.

Cheers,
- jonathan

-- 
Jonathan Adams, Solaris Kernel Development

You can have a lot more control over the "sub-directories" using zfs
commands.  You can set quotas, reservations, and compression (and other
settings) on one of the users but not others.  For example tom could have a 100G
quota (disk-space limit) and a 50G reservation (disk-space guarantee) and harry
could have a 50G quota and a 10G reservation.  You could turn compression on for
dick and not tom or harry.  You can also snapshot at different times/intervals
by having the "sub-directories" controlled by zfs as well.

I''m sure there are more reasons than this, but these are compelling
enough to consider using the zfs commands instead of mkdir.  The docs have a
bunch of examples specifically showing this exact type of scenario
(user''s home disks) and may expain this topic better than I just did.

Hope it helps,
Jason
This message posted from opensolaris.org

Run "zfs" with no arguements and look at all the properties.

Those properties are enabled on a per-filesystem basis, so if for example if you
wanted tom''s home directory to be compressed, if he had his own
filesystem you could do "zfs set compression=on tank/home/tom". The
same goes for quotas, reservations, and everything else.

Snaphots, clones, and backups also work on a per-filesystem basis, so if you
were working on a project it might be handy to give the project its own
filesystem and snapshot it whenever you make significant progress.
This message posted from opensolaris.org

It would appear in summary that the zfs commands gives access or invokes
features associated with this new file system. Looks like I will be doing a lot
of [b]"zfsing"[/b] (is this a word??).

Thanks everyone.
This message posted from opensolaris.org