The good news for Mac users is: Apple is in the process of adopting zfs. The initial Mac OS X 10.5 release will only have a read-only version of zfs, and it will only be a command-line option. But developer seeds that enable read-write are already out, and it’s clear that either as part of the 10.5 maintenance releases or as part of Mac OS X 10.6 Apple will arrive at full-fledged zfs support.

Other issues are in-memory corruption. Again, back in the days before computer price wars, all computer RAM had parity bits. These days only server grade products do this. So if you’re a Mac user and worried about this, get a Mac Pro, they have all ECC RAM that fights that aspect of the problem.

Between zfs with a RAID-5 zpool and ECC RAM, things are pretty good on the “silent corruption” side of things. Obviously, you’ll still need off-site backup to cover local catastrophic failure (fire, flood, EMP, etc.) Low-grade replacement for off-site backup are uploads to sites like flickr, but it’s better than nothing. Ideally, have a few hundred GB worth of web space and a backup software that’s capable of using WebDAV or ftp as a backup target.

If all these are not enough to save your pictures, you’re likely having more important issues to worry about…

The good news for Mac users is: Apple is in the process of adopting zfs. The initial Mac OS X 10.5 release will only have a read-only version of zfs, and it will only be a command-line option. But developer seeds that enable read-write are already out, and it’s clear that either as part of the 10.5 maintenance releases or as part of Mac OS X 10.6 Apple will arrive at full-fledged zfs support.