rvp Thank you so much! This is exactly the kind of in-depth discussion I was trying to find. I am still going through it, this is very interesting.
(And I apologize for not responding sooner, I got on to other things and didn’t check the forum for a while.)
In case anyone is interested, my current take on the ZFS situation I mentioned is that I probably could have recovered much more easily if I had understood ZFS send/receive better and done incremental backups of the filesystem, rather than individual files. (I never realized how much faster the former is until a couple weeks ago!) If I ever go back to using a ZFS-based system I will set up a regular backup that does incremental sends of the filesystems to an external disk.
