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BTRFS blew up under my feet in July 2019 (Archlinux, up-to-date at the time). Sure, I powered down the machine with its reset switch, but it borked the FS; it r

BTRFS blew up under my feet in July 2019 (Archlinux, up-to-date at the time). Sure, I powered down the machine with its reset switch, but it borked the FS; it refused to mount RW and some of my files were inaccessible. Even though it had been some ~3 years with no issues whatsoever, btrfs still isn't up-to-par with ZFS' stability. Good thing I had syncthing running.

dsego 6y ago
Yikes, now you have me worried. I've recently set up btrfs on a Synology, mostly to get the advanced features like scrubbing and snapshots. But if it's too risky maybe I should've gone with ext4.
- moviuro 6y ago
  Meh, it's risky if you only have all your eggs in one basket. Just put multiple copies of your data everywhere, and don't think too much about it. Also, maybe Synology will manage its drives better than I did in my multiple-purpose desktop machine.
  - dsego 6y ago
    Someone gave me a reply on a different HN post that synology btrfs is fine, since it's using a different raid implementation? Hope I understood that right.
- saalweachter 6y ago
  I wonder how hard it would be to do a survey to turn anecdotes into data, rather than trying to do some sort of test to simulate corruption. Like, I've been using ZFS for about 10 years without a problem -- I had a disk in a mirrored setup go bad that I didn't notice for awhile, and when I replaced and rebuilt, I had a couple of files which had suffered corruption. But that's just my personal anecdote; I'm quite confident there are people using BTFS who can quote similar track records, and I assume there are people who have seen ZFS shit the bed for one reason or another.
quantumofalpha 6y ago
My experience as well! I've tried btrfs as root filesystem (because I wanted checksummed root and btrfs is easily available out of the box) a few times every now and then, last time probably 1-2 years ago - invariably it always somehow f*cked itself up sooner or later. In contrast, I never had a single non-hardware-related problem with ZFS in maybe decade of using it for NAS. It's totally rock solid! I've recently figured out how to do unattended root on ZFS setup to provision my PCs and never going back to btrfs no more.

dsego 6y ago

Yikes, now you have me worried. I've recently set up btrfs on a Synology, mostly to get the advanced features like scrubbing and snapshots. But if it's too risky maybe I should've gone with ext4.

moviuro 6y ago
Meh, it's risky if you only have all your eggs in one basket. Just put multiple copies of your data everywhere, and don't think too much about it. Also, maybe Synology will manage its drives better than I did in my multiple-purpose desktop machine.
- dsego 6y ago
  Someone gave me a reply on a different HN post that synology btrfs is fine, since it's using a different raid implementation? Hope I understood that right.
saalweachter 6y ago
I wonder how hard it would be to do a survey to turn anecdotes into data, rather than trying to do some sort of test to simulate corruption. Like, I've been using ZFS for about 10 years without a problem -- I had a disk in a mirrored setup go bad that I didn't notice for awhile, and when I replaced and rebuilt, I had a couple of files which had suffered corruption. But that's just my personal anecdote; I'm quite confident there are people using BTFS who can quote similar track records, and I assume there are people who have seen ZFS shit the bed for one reason or another.

quantumofalpha 6y ago

My experience as well! I've tried btrfs as root filesystem (because I wanted checksummed root and btrfs is easily available out of the box) a few times every now and then, last time probably 1-2 years ago - invariably it always somehow f*cked itself up sooner or later. In contrast, I never had a single non-hardware-related problem with ZFS in maybe decade of using it for NAS. It's totally rock solid! I've recently figured out how to do unattended root on ZFS setup to provision my PCs and never going back to btrfs no more.