Opinions on safety of dropbox ???

[Mike O'Dell]

RS is correct - if you are going to run ZFS
then his comments all apply.

however, i'm not at all sure that's a good idea
for the average 'puter punter. ZFS is without
question the state of the art in filesystems,
but it is also the most complex. Many things
about ZFS are *much* easier than any other
way of doing them, but that's only after you
get it figured out and manage to absorb the
requisite knowledge. The fact that professional
system administrators with significant ZFS
experience still get into arguments over the
right way to use ZFS to do <foo> will scare
some people, rightly or not.

If you aren't going to absolute maximum capacity,
use 2 Terabyte drives instead of 4s - they copy
in half the time even doing it the dumb way.

For whatever else they got wrong (the list 
isn't trivial), Data Robotics, the "Drobo" folks,
had the user experience right. Just add drives
and it takes care of it, and when one breaks,
just replace it. This assumes you haven't 
tried to be cute and tell the system what
to do because if left alone, it tried very hard
to make sure you didn't have to understand
how to help it.

ZFS doesn't have anything like that level of 
user cuddliness. That world assumes sysadmins
are trained professionals with significant clue
all by themselves and likely access to even more
clue.

The nice part about FreeNAS, though, is that one
of the people largely responsible for taming
FreeBSD and turning it into Mac OS X so that people
could have the power and flexibility of Unix without
having to know about all that is one of the head
hackers at the place that does FreeNAS.

so it *will* get better, or he'll die trying.

   -mo