Booting from a cd or usb with iso9660 has always provided one of the main benefits for utilizing Puppy. Keeping the base install seperate from the save is nice. Typically, with an fresh install, one can build up the needed apps and configs through a series of saves and remaster or as some do, make a sfs of the customizations.
After using the rollback function in Easy OS for a while, I realized it also served most of the same functions as above. Rolling back at every reboot seemed to keep the save from getting too big or corrupted.
Most backup scenarios have left me with disks full of seldomly accesed info, and a not well thought out plan for restoration should a disk fail, so I looked into mirroring two disks such that if one failed, it could simply be replaced and restored from the
other mirror.
Zfs has allowed me to both mirror and rollback quickly and easily.
More than a file system, ZFS is fundamentally different from traditional file systems. Combining the traditionally separate roles of volume manager and file system provides ZFS with unique advantages. The file system is now aware of the underlying structure of the disks. Traditional file systems could exist on a single disk alone at a time. If there were two disks then creating two separate file systems was necessary. A traditional hardware RAID configuration avoided this problem by presenting the operating system with a single logical disk made up of the space provided by physical disks on top of which the operating system placed a file system. ZFS' combination of the volume manager and the file system solves this and allows the creation of file systems that all share a pool of available storage. One big advantage of ZFS' awareness of the physical disk layout is that existing file systems grow automatically when adding extra disks to the pool. This new space then becomes available to the file systems. ZFS can also apply different properties to each file system. This makes it useful to create separate file systems and datasets instead of a single monolithic file system.
