<story><title>Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-fixes-october-update-file-deleting-bug-resumes-insider-testing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drbawb</author><text>Tangential to this when are operating systems going to ship w&amp;#x2F; CoW filesystems by default? Accidental deletion of critical directories has been a solved problem for years now. I take instant snapshots of my home directory on ZFS every hour, my boot environment is snapshotted before every update.&lt;p&gt;You could literally remove my entire root directory and at worst you&amp;#x27;ve minorly inconvenienced me: I now have to boot from a USB drive and run `zfs rollback` to the most recent snapshot. I&amp;#x27;d be impervious to most ransomware as well: my home directory is filled w&amp;#x2F; garbage now? Good thing it can&amp;#x27;t encrypt my &lt;i&gt;read only&lt;/i&gt; snapshots, even with root access. Oh and I can &lt;i&gt;serialize those snapshots across the network at the block level&lt;/i&gt; before I nuke the infected machine.&lt;p&gt;Of course humanity will always invent a bigger idiot, so it&amp;#x27;s possible a virus could gain root &amp;amp; exec some dangerous ZFS commands, or it&amp;#x27;s possible some MSFT employee could pass the `-r` flag and recursively delete a dataset &amp;amp; its snapshots in their post-update script. Plus let&amp;#x27;s not forget that no filesystem in the world will stop you from just zero-filling the drive. Still it&amp;#x27;s easy for me to imagine a world where I&amp;#x27;m completely impervious from ransomware: by way of only being able to delete critical snapshots when a hardware key is present or when my TPM is unlocked.&lt;p&gt;On the whole it seems to me CoW filesystems are a major step forward in safe-guarding users from accidental deletions. At a minimum they have other benefits (serialized incremental send streams, block level compression &amp;amp; dedup, etc.) that make backups easier to manage. -- Yet I still can&amp;#x27;t boot from ReFS on Windows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shawnz</author><text>NTFS does support copy-on-write through the volume shadow copy service (which powers the System Restore and Previous Versions features).</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows 10 October 2018 Update no longer deletes your data</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/10/microsoft-fixes-october-update-file-deleting-bug-resumes-insider-testing/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>drbawb</author><text>Tangential to this when are operating systems going to ship w&amp;#x2F; CoW filesystems by default? Accidental deletion of critical directories has been a solved problem for years now. I take instant snapshots of my home directory on ZFS every hour, my boot environment is snapshotted before every update.&lt;p&gt;You could literally remove my entire root directory and at worst you&amp;#x27;ve minorly inconvenienced me: I now have to boot from a USB drive and run `zfs rollback` to the most recent snapshot. I&amp;#x27;d be impervious to most ransomware as well: my home directory is filled w&amp;#x2F; garbage now? Good thing it can&amp;#x27;t encrypt my &lt;i&gt;read only&lt;/i&gt; snapshots, even with root access. Oh and I can &lt;i&gt;serialize those snapshots across the network at the block level&lt;/i&gt; before I nuke the infected machine.&lt;p&gt;Of course humanity will always invent a bigger idiot, so it&amp;#x27;s possible a virus could gain root &amp;amp; exec some dangerous ZFS commands, or it&amp;#x27;s possible some MSFT employee could pass the `-r` flag and recursively delete a dataset &amp;amp; its snapshots in their post-update script. Plus let&amp;#x27;s not forget that no filesystem in the world will stop you from just zero-filling the drive. Still it&amp;#x27;s easy for me to imagine a world where I&amp;#x27;m completely impervious from ransomware: by way of only being able to delete critical snapshots when a hardware key is present or when my TPM is unlocked.&lt;p&gt;On the whole it seems to me CoW filesystems are a major step forward in safe-guarding users from accidental deletions. At a minimum they have other benefits (serialized incremental send streams, block level compression &amp;amp; dedup, etc.) that make backups easier to manage. -- Yet I still can&amp;#x27;t boot from ReFS on Windows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Boulth</author><text>&amp;gt; Tangential to this when are operating systems going to ship w&amp;#x2F; CoW filesystems by default?&lt;p&gt;As far as I know Ubuntu ships with ZFS kernel module.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, as you undoubtedly know, ZFS support on Linux will always be a problem due to licensing.&lt;p&gt;As far as I know native encryption is not yet stable in ZFS.</text></comment>