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btrfs appreciation post (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

19 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4274796

Just wanted to share some love for this filesystem.

I’ve been running a btrfs raid1 continuously for over ten years, on a motley assortment of near-garbage hard drives of all different shapes and sizes. None of the original drives are still in it, and that server is now on its fourth motherboard. The data has survived it all!

It’s grown to 6 drives now, and most recently survived the runtime failure of a SATA controller card that four of them were attached to. After replacing it, I was stunned to discover that the volume was uncorrupted and didn’t even require repair.

So knock on wood — I’m not trying to tempt fate here. I just want to say thank you to all the devs for their hard work, and add some positive feedback to the heap since btrfs gets way more than it’s fair share of flak, which I personally find to be undeserved. Cheers!

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[+] TCB13 -10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yeah BTRFS is way more reliable than Ext4. A simple power failure or other hardware fuckup with Ext4 and you can be sure all your data is gone, with BTRFS your data will survive a lot of shit.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's ridiculously exaggerated and you know it.

[–] TCB13 -1 points 1 year ago

Yes it is :) but comparatively I've never lost a volume / disk to BTRFS in years of the same scenarios.

[–] Quazatron 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My experience says otherwise.

Ext4 is rock solid and will survive power loss without a problem.

I love btrfs for the compression and snapshot capabilities, but it still has a long way to go to reach ext4 maturity.

That's not a shot at btrfs, it's just that filesystem maturity and reliability take time.

[–] TCB13 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't share your enthusiasm about Ext4's safety. I've had multiple disks lost to simple power failures at home and more complex hardware failures at datacenters. At the time I migrated to XFS - which also always performed better than Ext4 when things failed - and then moved to BTRFS when become mostly stable.

[–] Quazatron 1 points 1 year ago

I really appreciate how good XFS is, but for the longest time it had a feature missing that I really like to have: shrinking partitions.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I've been using Ext4 for over 150 years now and I never had any issues with it. I did not only survive multiple power failures but also house fire, couple direct hits with EMP and a zombie apocalypse.

[–] Wispy2891 3 points 1 year ago

I had the exact opposite experience. A power loss destroyed my btrfs boot drive, it couldn't be mounted anymore