i’ve instaled opensuse tumbleweed a bunch of times in the last few years, but i always used ext4 instead of btrfs because of previous bad experiences with it nearly a decade ago. every time, with no exceptions, the partition would crap itself into an irrecoverable state
this time around i figured that, since so many years had passed since i last tried btrfs, the filesystem would be in a more reliable state, so i decided to try it again on a new opensuse installation. already, right after installation, os-prober failed to setup opensuse’s entry in grub, but maybe that’s on me, since my main system is debian (turns out the problem was due to btrfs snapshots)
anyway, after a little more than a week, the partition turned read-only in the middle of a large compilation and then, after i rebooted, the partition died and was irrecoverable. could be due to some bad block or read failure from the hdd (it is supposedly brand new, but i guess it could be busted), but shit like this never happens to me on extfs, even if the hdd is literally dying. also, i have an ext4 and an ufs partition in the same hdd without any issues.
even if we suppose this is the hardware’s fault and not btrfs’s, should a file system be a little bit more resilient than that? at this rate, i feel like a cosmic ray could set off a btrfs corruption. i hear people claim all the time how mature btrfs is and that it no longer makes sense to create new ext4 partitions, but either i’m extremely unlucky with btrfs or the system is in fucking perpetual beta state and it will never change because it is just good enough for companies who can just, in the case of a partition failure, can just quickly switch the old hdd for a new one and copy the nightly backup over to it
in any case, i am never going to touch btrfs ever again and i’m always going to advise people to choose ext4 instead of btrfs
I switched to XFS.
The most important feature to me is support for file deduction which is supported by XFS through reflink. BTRFS supports reflinks as well.
Snapshot in BTRFS seems like the most desirable feature, but in real life I ended up not using it.
These days I simply have 2 disks and nightly rsync job copies content of one drive to another. This protects from drive failure.
Rclone job sends most important data to offsite backup.
I have had small issues with btrfs over the years, but nothing like the dataloss issues people reported a few years back that the devs supposedly fixed. Its scrubbing mechanism doesn’t work great, and the failure modes on RAID are fucking goofy. I wouldn’t trust it for raid at all, and they’ve never really fixed the bugs that have been exposed over the years.
Frankly, it does everything worse than ZFS except for be in the kernel. DKMS isn’t that hard and I’ve never had a ZFS build hook fail. The only thing I use btrfs for is cattle computers that I can nuke and pave at will, and most of those could use ext4 just fine, but that’s what Fedora uses by default and I can’t be arsed to partition manually.
I literally daily drive btrfs. Just don’t use a crappy drive or use raid5/raid6.
BTRFS RAID5/6 is fine as long you don’t run into a scenario where your machine crashes and there was still unwritten data in the cache. Also write performance sucks and scrubbing takes an eternity.
Just do a search on your favorite search engine for “btrfs raid5/6 write hole bug” and you’ll see. If power gets cut, any file on the set of disks could be missing, or just have bunch of garbage.
My two cents: the only time I had an issue with Btrfs, it refused to mount without using a FS repair tool (and was fine afterwards, and I knew which files needed to be checked for possible corruption). When I had an issue with ext4, I didn’t know about it until I tried to access an old file and it was 0 bytes - a completely silent corruption I found out probably months after it actually happened.
Both filesystems failed, but one at least notified me about it, while the second just “pretended” everything was fine while it ate my data.
Been using BTRFS since I learned I could squeeze more data on my cheap-ass drive and… It’s been 3 years, no problem at all, and I have backups anyway.
