3 ms·

> just not gone use anything with BTRFS. Why? (Legitimately asking, I haven't played around much with using different filesystems.)

nickik 6y ago
A filesystem should systematically from the ground up be designed to be safe, specially one making the claims of BTRFS. BTRFS however went threw a number of cycles where it was considered save and then end up having issues. Of course there were always features considered unstable. It eating my own data, using non of the unstable features at the time. Maybe I could have recovered it but neither me nor the best IT person I know could recover anything. My file system rule is simple, eat my data once and I will never use you again. Maybe its all fine now, and all these issues are gone. Likely this is the case, however I will not use it again. I would not recommend people not use it, but I'm simply not going to.
- ulzeraj 6y ago
  Micro-OS uses BTRFS for operating system only. User data defaults to XFS. The transactional-server role mounts the operating system as read only with /var and /etc being virtual file systems that are committed each shutdown. You can use whatever you want including ZFS for your data.
  - Conan_Kudo 6y ago
    That's not true. User data has defaulted to Btrfs for over two years now. This change occurred across the entire family of openSUSE distributions.
- pnutjam 6y ago
  Things change, new stuff always takes awhile to stabilize. ZFS went into Solaris n 2001, Btrfs went into the Linux kernel in 2013. I've been using it for at least 5 years with no issues.
gsa 6y ago
Not the OP, but I used btrfs till a couple of years ago for my root partition. Because of the nature of snapshots, the partition gradually fills up after big system updates. The usual `df` command is inaccurate with btrfs. Instead there's a set of btrfs specific tooling that you need to learn which can show the actual space in use. Freeing up unused space from older snapshots also requires manual work. I often had to start removing the oldest snapshot and it'd turn out that it didn't free up enough space. Continue repeating the step of deleting oldest snapshot and hoping it frees up enough space. It's possible the tooling is better/convenient now, but I prefer to stick with ext4 now.
- nickik 6y ago
  Same thing happens with ZFS to be fair.

nickik 6y ago

A filesystem should systematically from the ground up be designed to be safe, specially one making the claims of BTRFS. BTRFS however went threw a number of cycles where it was considered save and then end up having issues. Of course there were always features considered unstable. It eating my own data, using non of the unstable features at the time. Maybe I could have recovered it but neither me nor the best IT person I know could recover anything. My file system rule is simple, eat my data once and I will never use you again. Maybe its all fine now, and all these issues are gone. Likely this is the case, however I will not use it again. I would not recommend people not use it, but I'm simply not going to.

ulzeraj 6y ago
Micro-OS uses BTRFS for operating system only. User data defaults to XFS. The transactional-server role mounts the operating system as read only with /var and /etc being virtual file systems that are committed each shutdown. You can use whatever you want including ZFS for your data.
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  That's not true. User data has defaulted to Btrfs for over two years now. This change occurred across the entire family of openSUSE distributions.
pnutjam 6y ago
Things change, new stuff always takes awhile to stabilize. ZFS went into Solaris n 2001, Btrfs went into the Linux kernel in 2013. I've been using it for at least 5 years with no issues.

gsa 6y ago

Not the OP, but I used btrfs till a couple of years ago for my root partition. Because of the nature of snapshots, the partition gradually fills up after big system updates. The usual `df` command is inaccurate with btrfs. Instead there's a set of btrfs specific tooling that you need to learn which can show the actual space in use. Freeing up unused space from older snapshots also requires manual work. I often had to start removing the oldest snapshot and it'd turn out that it didn't free up enough space. Continue repeating the step of deleting oldest snapshot and hoping it frees up enough space. It's possible the tooling is better/convenient now, but I prefer to stick with ext4 now.

nickik 6y ago
Same thing happens with ZFS to be fair.