Spend an hour setting up a ZFS on old hardware. Play with snapshots and manually delete test documents until you are confident on how the feature works.
Highly recommended! One can even learn about, and experiment with, ZFS using files sitting on a disk by setting the files up as loopback devices. For example:
It may be simpler to play with ZFS on VMs. The VM-disks will be small and inefficient, but "good enough" to prove whether or not the system works.
Not that I've tried any of this before. I happened to have an old computer lying around with ~4 small hard drives that I messed with to learn the ins-and-outs of ZFS the first time I used it. (Shuck hard drives, pull them out of laptops, etc. etc. Its not really that hard to get 4 hard drives to play with, especially if you ask your friends for ancient laptops with 200gb drives or something)
