File System Repair

With traditional file systems, the way in which data is written is inherently vulnerable to unexpected failure causing file system inconsistencies. Because a traditional file system is not transactional, unreferenced blocks, bad link counts, or other inconsistent file system structures are possible. The addition of journaling does solve some of these problems, but can introduce additional problems when the log cannot be rolled back. With ZFS, none of these problems exist. The only way for inconsistent data to exist on disk is through hardware failure (in which case the pool should have been redundant) or a bug exists in the ZFS software.

Given that the fsck utility is designed to repair known pathologies specific to individual file systems, writing such a utility for a file system with no known pathologies is impossible. Future experience might prove that certain data corruption problems are common enough and simple enough such that a repair utility can be developed, but these problems can always be avoided by using redundant pools.

If your pool is not redundant, the chance that file system corruption can render some or all of your data inaccessible is always present.