An advanced file system that can span multiple disks, heal itself from data corruption, deduplicate data, encrypt, etc.
ZFS is both a file-system and a lvm that supports
- various raid layouts,
- checksumming data to detect and repair corruption,
- transparent compression,
- copy-on-write snapshots and clones,
- block device datasets (ZVOLs),
- sending and receiving data streams,
- resilvering only missing data rather than resyncing an entire RAID device,
- dynamic striping, and
- data deduplication.
ZFS was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, but in 2010, Oracle Corporation closed the source, which caused ZFS to fork into Oracle's closed-source branch and OpenZFS.
btrfs is a similar file system developed for linux.
Apple File System (APFS) is a similar file system developed by Apple.
Resilient File System (ReFS) is a similar file system developed by Microsoft.