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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/Difficult-Scheme4536 on 2025-07-18 08:35:41+00:00.

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share something unexpected that came out of a filesystem project I’ve been working on, ZeroFS: https://github.com/Barre/zerofs

I built ZeroFS, an NBD + NFS server that makes S3 storage behave like a real filesystem using an LSM-tree backend. While testing it, I got curious and tried creating a ZFS pool on top of it… and it actually worked!

So now we have ZFS running on S3 object storage, complete with snapshots, compression, and all the ZFS features we know and love. The demo is here: https://asciinema.org/a/kiI01buq9wA2HbUKW8klqYTVs

This gets interesting when you consider the economics of “garbage tier” S3-compatible storage. You could theoretically run a ZFS pool on the cheapest object storage you can find - those $5-6/TB/month services, or even archive tiers if your use case can handle the latency. With ZFS compression, the effective cost drops even further.

Even better: OpenDAL support is being merged soon, which means you’ll be able to create ZFS pools on top of… well, anything. OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, you name it. Yes, you could pool multiple consumer accounts together into a single ZFS filesystem.

ZeroFS handles the heavy lifting of making S3 look like block storage to ZFS (through NBD), with caching and batching to deal with S3’s latency.

This enables pretty fun use-cases such as Geo-Distributed ZFS :)

https://github.com/Barre/zerofs?tab=readme-ov-file#geo-distributed-storage-with-zfs

Bonus: ZFS ends up being a pretty compelling end-to-end test in the CI! https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/actions/runs/16341082754/job/46163622940#step:12:49