Today I Learned: ZFS send/receive is Like rsync, but Developed by a Much More Evolved Species

If you use ZFS, you already know that it completely knocks the socks off of other filesystems. It prevents and corrects data corruption, gives you incredible flexibility, and basically gives you everything you could ever want from a filesystem. If you use OpenZFS on several systems already, you probably know about the ‘send’ and ‘receive’ commands to do incremental transfer of snapshots between systems.

Here’s a great video on ZFS send and receive, which goes much deeper than most videos into how send and receive are implemented, along with some clever ideas for use cases where send/receive can really save you a lot of time and pain.

Because being able to mimic $50,000 enterprise filesystem replication on your home NAS or your little ‘friends-and-family’ WordPress hosting server is pretty effing cool.