JoostTeam

Perhaps overcome with excitement (and forgetting that Apple doesn’t like such pre-emptive disclosures), Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz announced today at Sun event in Washington D.C. that Apple would be making ZFS “the file system” in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard

ZFS is a new kind of filesystem that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. Thousands of filesystems can draw from a common storage pool, each one consuming only as much space as it actually needs.

The combined I/O bandwidth of all devices in the pool is available to all filesystems at all times. A scrub traverses the entire storage pool to read every copy of every block, validate it against its 256-bit checksum, and repair it if necessary.

ZFS provides unlimited constant-time snapshots and clones. Any snapshot can generate a full backup, and any pair of snapshots can generate an incremental backup. In addition to reducing space usage by 2-3x, compression also reduces the amount of I/O by 2-3x.

It should therefore be no surprise that Apple adopt this file system as the basis for “Time Machine“.

[Via MacRumors]

Update:

Sorry for the typo in the title Now corrected!