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As personal experiences go, btrfs works great for me. I've been using it on a 6 drive NAS since 2012, and on two laptops with SSDs. In my experience "crashes"

by zlynx 8y ago

As personal experiences go, btrfs works great for me. I've been using it on a 6 drive NAS since 2012, and on two laptops with SSDs. In my experience "crashes" are symptoms of people who didn't read the documentation and don't understand how to recover. For example, on the laptops I've often run out of disk space. And btrfs can run into a situation where it can't clean up partly used blocks without more disk space. To recover you have to add more space. I usually used the swap partition, but a USB stick also works. Or a RAM drive, but that's risky. Some other issues I've had to help people with is snapshot deletion. Deleting a btrfs snapshot appears instant but none of the used space comes back. That's because it is doing it in the background and it can take a really long time. OTOH, ext4 does exactly the same thing with background delete of very large files.

cookiecaper 8y ago
>In my experience "crashes" are symptoms of people who didn't read the documentation and don't understand how to recover. aka most users. Filesystems must be reasonably resilient to incorrect usage. This is a problem across the board; if you're not careful setting up a ZFS pool, it's easy to accidentally create a scenario where you're unwittingly striping across multiple devices, greatly increasing the likelihood of a catastrophic data loss event without ensuring the user is fully aware.
paulie_a 8y ago
I've lost multiple terabytes with btrfs on multiple different systems. It was essentially a random occurance. These were all cases of simply using it as a regular filesystem. I read the docs I attempted recovery. They didn't work. And quite frankly I shouldn't need to take those steps anyways. As for your example that seems insane someone should have to jump through hoops like that to utilize a hard drive. Btrfs is junk and I am glad it has been removed as the default on a couple distros.
- zlynx 8y ago
  "hoops like that" Yeah that's every filesystem ever. I helped a guy out just a couple of months ago because his Debian virtual machine had plenty of disk space but he couldn't install anything. Because it was out of inodes. What "regular user" aka Nodejs / React developer knows about inodes? Not that guy. So I guess ext4 is junk too.

by zlynx 8y ago

cookiecaper 8y ago

>In my experience "crashes" are symptoms of people who didn't read the documentation and don't understand how to recover. aka most users. Filesystems must be reasonably resilient to incorrect usage. This is a problem across the board; if you're not careful setting up a ZFS pool, it's easy to accidentally create a scenario where you're unwittingly striping across multiple devices, greatly increasing the likelihood of a catastrophic data loss event without ensuring the user is fully aware.

paulie_a 8y ago

I've lost multiple terabytes with btrfs on multiple different systems. It was essentially a random occurance. These were all cases of simply using it as a regular filesystem. I read the docs I attempted recovery. They didn't work. And quite frankly I shouldn't need to take those steps anyways. As for your example that seems insane someone should have to jump through hoops like that to utilize a hard drive. Btrfs is junk and I am glad it has been removed as the default on a couple distros.

zlynx 8y ago
"hoops like that" Yeah that's every filesystem ever. I helped a guy out just a couple of months ago because his Debian virtual machine had plenty of disk space but he couldn't install anything. Because it was out of inodes. What "regular user" aka Nodejs / React developer knows about inodes? Not that guy. So I guess ext4 is junk too.