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Lack of Imagination
Personal blog · lackofimagination.orgprogrammingsystems
Lack of Imagination is a personal blog at lackofimagination.org about programming and systems. Since 2022, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 38 times, most often “Our Experience with PostgreSQL on ZFS”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link this blog as a write-up of running a large multi-TB PostgreSQL database on ZFS, covering snapshot-based backups, test environments from snapshots, and compression.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Our Experience with PostgreSQL on ZFS4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-04-19
- Teaching Programming with Basic2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-07-16
- Managing Side Effects: A JavaScript Effect System in 30 Lines or Less2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-11-27
- Lessons from David Lynch: A Software Developer's Perspective2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-15
- Self-Documenting Code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-10-22
- Avoiding if-else Hell: The Functional Style2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-25
What Hacker News says?
A viable strategy, but requires an experienced Linux/Unix admin and quite some planning & setup effort. There are a lot of non-obvious gotchas with ZFS, and a lot of knobs to turn to make it do what you want. Anecdotally, a coworker of mine set it up on his development machine back when Ubuntu was heavily promoting it for default installs. It worked well until one day his machine started randomly freezing for minute…
Comment linking /2022/04/our-experience-with-postgresql-on-zfs/
on “Show HN: A CLI tool I made to self-host any app with two commands on a VPS”Submitted Firewalling your code as a story · 124 points
HN discussionWe've been using a multi-TB PostgreSQL database on ZFS for quite a few years in production and have encountered zero problems so far, including no bit flips. In case anyone is interested, our experience is documented here: https://lackofimagination.org/2022/04/our-experience-with-po...
Comment linking /2022/04/our-experience-with-postgresql-on-zfs/
on “My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures”Submitted Self-Documenting Code as a story · 72 points
HN discussionI don't know about bcachefs' capability on this but with zfs, you can do an instant snapshot of MySQL/PostgreSQL data directory and call it a backup instead of fighting the tough fight that is database backup with their dump utilities taking a good amount of space and time and not easy to do incremental backups. https://lackofimagination.org/2022/04/our-experience-with-po... https://www.percona.com/blog/2017/12/07/h…
Comment linking /2022/04/our-experience-with-postgresql-on-zfs/
on “Bringing Bcachefs to Linux Mainline”Submitted Writing Composable SQL Using Knex and Pipelines as a story · 58 points
HN discussionYou don't actually need a dedicated ZFS backup program. A simple cron script will handle incremental backups just fine. If anyone is interested, the script we use to backup our multi-TB PostgreSQL database can be found here: https://lackofimagination.org/2022/04/our-experience-with-po...
Comment linking /2022/04/our-experience-with-postgresql-on-zfs/
on “Disaster Recovery with ZFS and Zrepl”Submitted Teaching Programming with Basic as a story · 22 points
HN discussionZFS is a game changer for quickly and reliably backing up large multi-terabyte PostgreSQL databases as well. In case anyone is interested, here is our experience with PostgreSQL on ZFS, complete with a short backup script: https://lackofimagination.org/2022/04/our-experience-with-po...
Comment linking /2022/04/our-experience-with-postgresql-on-zfs/
on “The various scripts I use to back up my home computers using SSH and rsync”Submitted Avoiding if-else Hell: The Functional Style as a story · 21 points
HN discussionIt's also possible to implement a functional effect system in under 30 lines of JavaScript: https://lackofimagination.org/2025/11/managing-side-effects-...
Comment linking /2025/11/managing-side-effects-a-javascript-effect-system-in-30-lines-or-less/
on “Async Programming Is Just Inject Time”Submitted Beyond Foreign Keys as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWe have been running a large multi-TB PostgreSQL database on ZFS for years now. ZFS makes it super easy to do backups, create test environments from past snapshots, and saves a lot of disk space thanks to built-in compression. In case anyone is interested, you can read our experience at https://lackofimagination.org/2022/04/our-experience-with-po...
Comment linking /2022/04/our-experience-with-postgresql-on-zfs/
on “ZFS for Dummies”Submitted Self-Documenting Code as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI think it's safe to say that the majority of developers don't give a second thought to writing code with I/O tangled with business logic. It's all too common to see code like: const userExists = findUser(email); if (!userExists) await saveUser(user); Now, you may ask: what's the big deal? When we write code like this, two things happen: 1. It gets harder to debug production bugs. Unless you have the exact same data…
Comment linking /tags/effect/
on a deleted threadSubmitted Our Experience with PostgreSQL on ZFS as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Managing Side Effects: A JavaScript Effect System in 30 Lines or Less as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lessons from David Lynch: A Software Developer's Perspective as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lessons from David Lynch: A Software Developer's Perspective as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Teaching Programming with Basic as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Easy Application Deployments with Linux as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lodash, a middle ground between JavaScript and TypeScript as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Mocks Are the Little-Death: Escaping the Mirage of Green Tests as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Time-Travel Debugging: Replaying Production Bugs Locally as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Innocent Loop as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Teaching Programming with Basic as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I Don't Trust My Own Code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Back to Basics in Web Apps as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Economics of Bugs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Works on My Machine as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
