6 ms·

Whats is your personal experience with Brtfs

Cogitri 7y ago
Catastrophic, my BTRFS died twice on me after a hard reset and the recovery tools haven't helped me. Luckily I had backups around, so switching to ZFS 0.8 with encryption was a breeze.
riquito 7y ago
Home usage,with encryption, over 4/5 years, had some hard reset and never lost data. Nothing to complain
opless 7y ago
BRTFS catastrophically failed on me twice. I have ZFS on another box that failed badly but lost no data... That was with bad ram and a motherboard that was on the "do not use" list for making ZFS NAS boxes. It always recovered the errors Currently using it in RAID mode to hold large data sets and CCTV footage for my homelab on three drives that have smart warnings for age without any issues at all for the past two and a half years and two Ubuntu upgrades
- adamzegelin 7y ago
  > "do not use" list Care to link to this list. Just want to check that my board isn't on said list!
  - opless 7y ago
    Sorry, this was a couple of years ago now. I can’t even find it casually grepping my irc logs.
rhn_mk1 7y ago
NAS usage, over mdadm RAID1, over about 10 years (and 1 or 2 drive failures, 1 or 2 bad RAM dies) I didn't lose a file that I could definitely attribute to btrfs. I did lose a piece of a file I keep on it, but I cannot conclude it didn't arrive there damaged. I used to hit out of space errors on rebalancing at high usage levels, but since around kernel 4.0 the only time I hit one was when I altered data duplication settings.
- zlynx 7y ago
  I don't understand why anyone would run btrfs with MD RAID. That configuration loses the ability to recover from corrupted blocks. All that MD can do is in response to actual reported drive errors. If one of the drives accepts the write but then later silently returns the old data, which is a failure mode I have actually seen, MD can't do anything reasonable to fix it.
  - rhn_mk1 7y ago
    Native btrfs RAID1 wasn't stable when I started using it. I still wanted the stable non-RAID for the sake of snapshots.
unixhero 7y ago
I use BTRFS without any need of being afraid of FS crash. BTRFS has a lightweight footprint and let's me create a raid0 over many old hardrives. And ...zfs for secure workloads.
pwg 7y ago
Catastrophic. BTRFS failed twice with a large raid array when one of the drives started developing bad sectors (two different drives at two different times, same result, entire raid array unrecoverable). After catastrophic failure number two I decided to never run BTRFS again.
JustFinishedBSG 7y ago
BTRFS is the only filesytem that failed and was rendered unrecoverable in all my life ( after a hard reset ) . That's an anecdote sure but that's enough to never use it ever again for me. In my opinion BTRFS is rotted at the core, I'm more interested by Bcachefs future.
- h1d 7y ago
  It feels less worse if they have good developers on pay roll and active community reporting bugs but I guess I don't see that for btrfs.
- aidenn0 7y ago
  I mentioned this elsewhere, but as a counter anecdote, ZFS is the only filesystem that failed and was rendered unrecoverable in all of my life. That being said btrfs was quite janky, and I had to recover it on more than one occasion.
Piezoid 7y ago
Honestly not bad. About 7 years of use on personal machine, single volume. It simpler than ZFS and allows cheap incremental backups with send/receive. One year ago I built a RAID56 with 5 used 2TB drives from eBay. Risky move, but it went smoothly so far. It's only for home storage and important stuff is backuped off site anyway. One Seagate drive died with lots a bad sectors. The replace command took really long even with the "-r" flag (don't read from replaced drive, in theory), so I ended up unplugging the drive and rebalancing from there. I have high hopes for bcachefs. We have a real need for a modern FS with tiered caches. I backed the project but I don't have the skills or time to help.
- brokenkebab 7y ago
  ZFS allows cheap inc backups with send/receive.
  - Piezoid 7y ago
    Yes, I'm aware of that. Sorry, bad wording. I choose btrfs because it's simpler to setup. It is also lighter on memory for uses on personal machines. I know ZFS can work with less memory but at a performance disadvantage.
    - brokenkebab 7y ago
      I found the need for a plenty of RAM a little overblown for ZFS. My anecdotal experience: I repaired my home file server replacing faulty RAM with 2G stick (because that was only spare piece I had) as a temporary solution. But as it often happens with temporary solutions it lasted longer, for slightly less then two years. Prefetch feature was automatically disabled, but there were no delays which my perception can register. I suppose speed degradation would be visible on heavy-lifting server, but exactly for personal use one doesn't need any special amount of RAM.
josteink 7y ago
For some reason my laptop with a single-volume btrfs root-fs, would regularly have btrfs degrade into read-only mode. Rendering my laptop and the running system inoperable without a hard reset. I’ve had no such issues with ZFS, not even on the exact same hardware and Ubuntu-release. Needless to say, I’m not using btrfs anymore. Edit: for perspective, I’ve never had this btrfs issue on desktops or servers. Laptops only. Might be suspend/resume related?
mikedilger 7y ago
I've had one catastrophic failure with btrfs long ago, and have rarely used it since. I've had one failure with ZFS that required developer help (space map corruption) but I got all my data back.
pmlnr 7y ago
Has been running perfectly fine as single disk/partition fs for me. I'm using it on our laptops' data partition because of the compression support. I wouldn't trust it's RAID features though.
the8472 7y ago
Some recoverable corruption on virtual machines that did not honor write barriers properly. No issues as single-disk filesystem on physical machines.
maxdamantus 7y ago
I've been using btrfs as my primary filesystem on all of my computers (other than my phone) since 2013. Initially I had performance issues due to the default block size back then (4 KiB rather than 16 KiB; ended up just rebuilding the filesystem). There were some other issues back then regarding rebalancing and scrubbing stability, and sometimes I would have to run "btrfs-zero-log" before mounting, but I haven't had those sorts of issues for a while. I've had multiple drive failures on my systems, and btrfs seemed to handle them as expected. I use "raid1" for metadata and "single" for data. As far as I can tell, all of the errors were due to bad blocks on physically failing drives, and btrfs was able to indicate which files were affected in all of those cases. I've also used it to "fix" the Raspberry Pi SD card corruption issue by just running btrfs in "dup" mode—prior to that, the SD card would randomly end up with blocks being zeroed and the system would obviously start to crash, whereas btrfs just fixes the blocks up in place as it accesses the data the next time.
zlynx 7y ago
I've been using btrfs on my home NAS (a custom build) and on my Linux laptops with SSDs since 2012. I run Fedora on everything which I think helps because I've never been stuck on an old kernel with old, stupid bugs. Only the freshest bugs for me! The NAS had two WD Red drives fail over the years with bad blocks. Not at the same time. They were detected and I replaced them with new bigger drives. Since 2012 I added more drives until now it is at 6 drives in RAID10: 4x6 TB and 2x4 TB. I've had out of space errors on my laptops which I had to repair by adding more storage so I could successfully rebalance. Stealing the swap partition worked great for that. Never lost any data or had any corrupt files. Also, I always build with quality Gold standard PSUs, ECC RAM, and run my systems always plugged into an APC UPS. So I've never tried to recover a system that crashed after a lightning storm, built with WD Green drives in external USB enclosures plugged into a $2 power-strip and an HP "desktop" built out of an old laptop motherboard and the cheapest PSU HP could dig out of the trash pile.
Dylan16807 7y ago
I haven't lost any data on BTRFS, but on a couple drives set to do frequent snapshots they ended up getting slower and slower until hanging for up to many seconds at a time. And this was with only 30-40 snapshots existing at a time. And then in another instance it got all confused and impossible to mount read-write. It kept trying to resume some kind of transaction that wouldn't complete even with dozens of hours of CPU time. But on the plus side it deduplicates properly, without extreme overhead.
archi42 7y ago
My cold storage NAS with 12 old HDDs (400GB to 1TB) acts as my btrfs test-env. It's all old hardware: Disks are salvaged from the company [after being shredded], the system is an Athlon Dual Core 5000+ on some MoBo with 4 SATA ports; no ECC, recently replaced the LSI 8 disk SAS controller with a 3ware 9560 12 disk variant (both as JBOD). No problems in the past few years, though it's only seeing a few hours uptime per week. It just acts as backup for data stored elsewhere, so a crash would be annoying, but not fatal - but I'm contemplating getting some new 4TB disks (now that I have a suitable controller) and putting a Plex on the thing.
rodgerd 7y ago
For the years I ran btrfs it was a great way to testing my backup and restore processes; it also gave me a nostalgia trip back to the mid-late nineties Linux experience, where you had to carefully select kernels based on which combination of features and regressions you can live with.
lucb1e 7y ago
I thought I did things right and had setup regular scrubbing. The two external drives that were btrfs mirrors of each other got out of sync, I assume caused by a power outage (the host was a laptop and has a battery, a rare scenario I guess, so I can see how this happened). Due to not reading the man page correctly, I then messed things up further... This was like a year ago and I still haven't cleaned it all up due to: (1) lack of a third drive to restore stuff to (I'd prefer to leave the damaged filesystems in read-only), (2) a lack of time, (3) there now seems to be a bug in the kernel drive for my particular drives (perhaps it wasn't a power outage after all?), and (4) because I now live far away from the physical location of the drives. Instead of using Btrfs to fix problems, I am now looking for the simplest possible solution. I was thinking of just using plain old ext4 and relying on one local and one off-site backup. It will be more work to manually look at the state of my files when a failure happens, but with something like Restic I'm at least confident that any completed backups are sound (as well as secure: Restic is the first system that I've found to be efficient while also trusting the crypto enough to back up to untrusted locations). The only open question is what to do about bit rot on the main system, since any bit rot on ext4 would just be backed up as if it was the original data. So then... maybe I'll go with Btrfs after all, using only the checksumming feature should not cause any bugs right? I haven't decided yet. First up is trying to fix this driver issue somewhere next week.

Catastrophic, my BTRFS died twice on me after a hard reset and the recovery tools haven't helped me. Luckily I had backups around, so switching to ZFS 0.8 with encryption was a breeze.

riquito 7y ago

Home usage,with encryption, over 4/5 years, had some hard reset and never lost data. Nothing to complain

opless 7y ago

BRTFS catastrophically failed on me twice. I have ZFS on another box that failed badly but lost no data... That was with bad ram and a motherboard that was on the "do not use" list for making ZFS NAS boxes. It always recovered the errors Currently using it in RAID mode to hold large data sets and CCTV footage for my homelab on three drives that have smart warnings for age without any issues at all for the past two and a half years and two Ubuntu upgrades

adamzegelin 7y ago
> "do not use" list Care to link to this list. Just want to check that my board isn't on said list!
- opless 7y ago
  Sorry, this was a couple of years ago now. I can’t even find it casually grepping my irc logs.

rhn_mk1 7y ago

NAS usage, over mdadm RAID1, over about 10 years (and 1 or 2 drive failures, 1 or 2 bad RAM dies) I didn't lose a file that I could definitely attribute to btrfs. I did lose a piece of a file I keep on it, but I cannot conclude it didn't arrive there damaged. I used to hit out of space errors on rebalancing at high usage levels, but since around kernel 4.0 the only time I hit one was when I altered data duplication settings.

zlynx 7y ago
I don't understand why anyone would run btrfs with MD RAID. That configuration loses the ability to recover from corrupted blocks. All that MD can do is in response to actual reported drive errors. If one of the drives accepts the write but then later silently returns the old data, which is a failure mode I have actually seen, MD can't do anything reasonable to fix it.
- rhn_mk1 7y ago
  Native btrfs RAID1 wasn't stable when I started using it. I still wanted the stable non-RAID for the sake of snapshots.

unixhero 7y ago

I use BTRFS without any need of being afraid of FS crash. BTRFS has a lightweight footprint and let's me create a raid0 over many old hardrives. And ...zfs for secure workloads.

pwg 7y ago

Catastrophic. BTRFS failed twice with a large raid array when one of the drives started developing bad sectors (two different drives at two different times, same result, entire raid array unrecoverable). After catastrophic failure number two I decided to never run BTRFS again.

JustFinishedBSG 7y ago

BTRFS is the only filesytem that failed and was rendered unrecoverable in all my life ( after a hard reset ) . That's an anecdote sure but that's enough to never use it ever again for me. In my opinion BTRFS is rotted at the core, I'm more interested by Bcachefs future.

h1d 7y ago
It feels less worse if they have good developers on pay roll and active community reporting bugs but I guess I don't see that for btrfs.
aidenn0 7y ago
I mentioned this elsewhere, but as a counter anecdote, ZFS is the only filesystem that failed and was rendered unrecoverable in all of my life. That being said btrfs was quite janky, and I had to recover it on more than one occasion.

Piezoid 7y ago

Honestly not bad. About 7 years of use on personal machine, single volume. It simpler than ZFS and allows cheap incremental backups with send/receive. One year ago I built a RAID56 with 5 used 2TB drives from eBay. Risky move, but it went smoothly so far. It's only for home storage and important stuff is backuped off site anyway. One Seagate drive died with lots a bad sectors. The replace command took really long even with the "-r" flag (don't read from replaced drive, in theory), so I ended up unplugging the drive and rebalancing from there. I have high hopes for bcachefs. We have a real need for a modern FS with tiered caches. I backed the project but I don't have the skills or time to help.

brokenkebab 7y ago
ZFS allows cheap inc backups with send/receive.
- Piezoid 7y ago
  Yes, I'm aware of that. Sorry, bad wording. I choose btrfs because it's simpler to setup. It is also lighter on memory for uses on personal machines. I know ZFS can work with less memory but at a performance disadvantage.
  - brokenkebab 7y ago
    I found the need for a plenty of RAM a little overblown for ZFS. My anecdotal experience: I repaired my home file server replacing faulty RAM with 2G stick (because that was only spare piece I had) as a temporary solution. But as it often happens with temporary solutions it lasted longer, for slightly less then two years. Prefetch feature was automatically disabled, but there were no delays which my perception can register. I suppose speed degradation would be visible on heavy-lifting server, but exactly for personal use one doesn't need any special amount of RAM.

josteink 7y ago

For some reason my laptop with a single-volume btrfs root-fs, would regularly have btrfs degrade into read-only mode. Rendering my laptop and the running system inoperable without a hard reset. I’ve had no such issues with ZFS, not even on the exact same hardware and Ubuntu-release. Needless to say, I’m not using btrfs anymore. Edit: for perspective, I’ve never had this btrfs issue on desktops or servers. Laptops only. Might be suspend/resume related?

mikedilger 7y ago

I've had one catastrophic failure with btrfs long ago, and have rarely used it since. I've had one failure with ZFS that required developer help (space map corruption) but I got all my data back.

pmlnr 7y ago

Has been running perfectly fine as single disk/partition fs for me. I'm using it on our laptops' data partition because of the compression support. I wouldn't trust it's RAID features though.

the8472 7y ago

Some recoverable corruption on virtual machines that did not honor write barriers properly. No issues as single-disk filesystem on physical machines.

maxdamantus 7y ago

I've been using btrfs as my primary filesystem on all of my computers (other than my phone) since 2013. Initially I had performance issues due to the default block size back then (4 KiB rather than 16 KiB; ended up just rebuilding the filesystem). There were some other issues back then regarding rebalancing and scrubbing stability, and sometimes I would have to run "btrfs-zero-log" before mounting, but I haven't had those sorts of issues for a while. I've had multiple drive failures on my systems, and btrfs seemed to handle them as expected. I use "raid1" for metadata and "single" for data. As far as I can tell, all of the errors were due to bad blocks on physically failing drives, and btrfs was able to indicate which files were affected in all of those cases. I've also used it to "fix" the Raspberry Pi SD card corruption issue by just running btrfs in "dup" mode—prior to that, the SD card would randomly end up with blocks being zeroed and the system would obviously start to crash, whereas btrfs just fixes the blocks up in place as it accesses the data the next time.

zlynx 7y ago

I've been using btrfs on my home NAS (a custom build) and on my Linux laptops with SSDs since 2012. I run Fedora on everything which I think helps because I've never been stuck on an old kernel with old, stupid bugs. Only the freshest bugs for me! The NAS had two WD Red drives fail over the years with bad blocks. Not at the same time. They were detected and I replaced them with new bigger drives. Since 2012 I added more drives until now it is at 6 drives in RAID10: 4x6 TB and 2x4 TB. I've had out of space errors on my laptops which I had to repair by adding more storage so I could successfully rebalance. Stealing the swap partition worked great for that. Never lost any data or had any corrupt files. Also, I always build with quality Gold standard PSUs, ECC RAM, and run my systems always plugged into an APC UPS. So I've never tried to recover a system that crashed after a lightning storm, built with WD Green drives in external USB enclosures plugged into a $2 power-strip and an HP "desktop" built out of an old laptop motherboard and the cheapest PSU HP could dig out of the trash pile.

Dylan16807 7y ago

I haven't lost any data on BTRFS, but on a couple drives set to do frequent snapshots they ended up getting slower and slower until hanging for up to many seconds at a time. And this was with only 30-40 snapshots existing at a time. And then in another instance it got all confused and impossible to mount read-write. It kept trying to resume some kind of transaction that wouldn't complete even with dozens of hours of CPU time. But on the plus side it deduplicates properly, without extreme overhead.

archi42 7y ago

My cold storage NAS with 12 old HDDs (400GB to 1TB) acts as my btrfs test-env. It's all old hardware: Disks are salvaged from the company [after being shredded], the system is an Athlon Dual Core 5000+ on some MoBo with 4 SATA ports; no ECC, recently replaced the LSI 8 disk SAS controller with a 3ware 9560 12 disk variant (both as JBOD). No problems in the past few years, though it's only seeing a few hours uptime per week. It just acts as backup for data stored elsewhere, so a crash would be annoying, but not fatal - but I'm contemplating getting some new 4TB disks (now that I have a suitable controller) and putting a Plex on the thing.

rodgerd 7y ago

For the years I ran btrfs it was a great way to testing my backup and restore processes; it also gave me a nostalgia trip back to the mid-late nineties Linux experience, where you had to carefully select kernels based on which combination of features and regressions you can live with.

lucb1e 7y ago

I thought I did things right and had setup regular scrubbing. The two external drives that were btrfs mirrors of each other got out of sync, I assume caused by a power outage (the host was a laptop and has a battery, a rare scenario I guess, so I can see how this happened). Due to not reading the man page correctly, I then messed things up further... This was like a year ago and I still haven't cleaned it all up due to: (1) lack of a third drive to restore stuff to (I'd prefer to leave the damaged filesystems in read-only), (2) a lack of time, (3) there now seems to be a bug in the kernel drive for my particular drives (perhaps it wasn't a power outage after all?), and (4) because I now live far away from the physical location of the drives. Instead of using Btrfs to fix problems, I am now looking for the simplest possible solution. I was thinking of just using plain old ext4 and relying on one local and one off-site backup. It will be more work to manually look at the state of my files when a failure happens, but with something like Restic I'm at least confident that any completed backups are sound (as well as secure: Restic is the first system that I've found to be efficient while also trusting the crypto enough to back up to untrusted locations). The only open question is what to do about bit rot on the main system, since any bit rot on ext4 would just be backed up as if it was the original data. So then... maybe I'll go with Btrfs after all, using only the checksumming feature should not cause any bugs right? I haven't decided yet. First up is trying to fix this driver issue somewhere next week.