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I've experienced data loss twice in 15 years of using Linux and trying different file systems. Both were on btrfs. I didn't use any advanced features, though I
by andrewstuart2 9y ago
I've experienced data loss twice in 15 years of using Linux and trying different file systems. Both were on btrfs. I didn't use any advanced features, though I had plans to before this happened. But at that point, I cut my losses and converted all my disks back to ext4.
The features are great, but data availability/integrity is the fundamental thing I want from a filesystem. If I write some bytes, they should be there tomorrow. Everything else is secondary.
- cyphar 9y agoIf you're interested in a more featureful filesystem that isn't btrfs and has a very solid track record, I would recommend looking at XFS. It's a very old filesystem but has a lot of quite modern features (and it performs better than ext4 for several workloads).
- kogepathic 9y ago> I would recommend looking at XFS. It's a very old filesystem but has a lot of quite modern features (and it performs better than ext4 for several workloads). I would second this. XFS is great. A few years ago I moved from JFS to XFS for bulk data storage because JFS is pretty abandoned these days. No issues at all with XFS, and never lost any data. Just make sure it's right for you before you use it (e.g. you cannot shrink XFS volumes as you can ext4)
- arjie 9y agoFunnily enough, XFS is the only file system on Linux where I've lost data. Back in the day, the wisdom was to stay away from it if you were in an iffy power situation because it would serve zeroes if there was a write to a file near a power loss (I.e. you wouldn't get old file or new file but something else) Having had that happen to me I always used some extN and didn't lose any existing files. Of course that's a decade or more ago and I may be misremembering but a cursory Google looks like other people encountered something like it too.
- crest 9y agoAfaik the problem is that XFS trusts the hardware to do the right thing during a power loss aka stop inflight requests before the brownout turns you disks and their controllers into heavily biased random number generators. Lots of x86(-64) hardware lacks a proper power loss interrupt triggered early enough to stop the all I/O in time. The ext3 journaling hides that problem to some extend by journaling more than just the minimal metadata required.
- msla 9y agoThen XFS isn't suitable for consumer-grade hardware.
- linsomniac 9y agoFor maybe 3-6 months a decade ago I was running XFS on my laptop. My laptop had some sort of flakiness, ISTR it was graphics related, and it would require frequent reboots for a while. I remember one particular instance where after a power cycle a file I was working on an hour prior to it was trashed. That was a real "Oh FFS!" moment and I stopped using XFS. But, I will say I've had a lot of success using XFS to serve images, particularly tiles. Particularly map tiles that are generated once and then basically static. There it has a lot less overhead when formatted with size=2048, so lots of small files are handled better. Of course, reiserfs was even better, but part of that was with a job I worked on where they just blindly rendered map tiles for the whole earth, and so there were a lot of 50 byte solid blue tiles. Reiser did really well with that, though some deduplication or linking would have been a huge benefit.
- yellowapple 9y agoXFS has been my FS of choice for a few years now. If I remember right, openSUSE even defaults to it for /home.
- ArneBab 9y agoXFS is the system where I lost all data when we had a powerloss.
- btmaybe 9y agoXFS has the same problem as btrfs: extreme sensitivity to metadata corruption. I'm not sure XFS has the RAID1-for-metadata (DUP) feature like btrfs has recently added.
- pnutjam 9y agoI believe Suse uses XFS for larger data volumes. Their emphasis os on btrfs for the OS and system drives where it can help with administration tasks.