2 ms·

> BTRFS by default seems compelling I must have missed something, because every person I've ever heard talk about BTRFS has said something along the lines of "

by hnarn 6y ago

> BTRFS by default seems compelling I must have missed something, because every person I've ever heard talk about BTRFS has said something along the lines of "I would never use that in production". Is that view of BTRFS outdated? Last time I used it for example, I tried out compression only to realize that there's actually no command to see what compression ratio is being applied without installing what I interpreted as a third party tool (compsize).

m463 6y ago
I started wondering about BTRFS when I read this: One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised features never materialized, and the drama and surprising behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I'll leave that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what). https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/
jeroenhd 6y ago
I've used BTRFS on my laptop for a while and it was working fine. In my use case, however, I ran into trouble because I was constantly near the edge of filling the file system so I very often needed to do rebalancing and other tricks to claim more free space. It was a bother, but it beat spending $150 I didn't have on a 512GB SSD at the time. For modern systems with normal use cases (i.e. not mine back then), I don't foresee a lot trouble. I went with encrypted ext4 because that was included in the installer during my reinstall, but I wouldn't change the settings if the installer had defaulted to BTRFS. There's a lot more tooling out there for debugging ext4, but honestly, I never really missed anything when I still used BTRFS. The lack of tools makes data recovery harder in case of a complete failure (always make backups, no matter what file system!) so I wouldn't use it in a production server, but for a desktop or laptop OS I don't really see the problem. Using Timeshift for snapshot management as a way to sort-of emulate Windows' system restore is kind of neat and got me interested in trying it out again next time I'm reinstalling Linux. Last time I didn't have the space for snapshots, but now I do and it solves a problem I've had before (quick and easy backups after modifying system config) with ext4-based installs.
pkaye 6y ago
I've heard Facebook uses btrfs in their data center.

by hnarn 6y ago

m463 6y ago

I started wondering about BTRFS when I read this: One thing I will not run is btrfs, aka ENOSPCfs. I saw it fail again, and again, and again, and again, AND AGAIN, and again, and again. Then I saw it fail some more. The promised features never materialized, and the drama and surprising behaviors never ceased. All costs, no benefits? I'll leave that on the shelf, a few spots down from reiserfs (which was plenty sketchy BEFORE you know who did you know what). https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/12/11/feedback/

jeroenhd 6y ago

I've used BTRFS on my laptop for a while and it was working fine. In my use case, however, I ran into trouble because I was constantly near the edge of filling the file system so I very often needed to do rebalancing and other tricks to claim more free space. It was a bother, but it beat spending $150 I didn't have on a 512GB SSD at the time. For modern systems with normal use cases (i.e. not mine back then), I don't foresee a lot trouble. I went with encrypted ext4 because that was included in the installer during my reinstall, but I wouldn't change the settings if the installer had defaulted to BTRFS. There's a lot more tooling out there for debugging ext4, but honestly, I never really missed anything when I still used BTRFS. The lack of tools makes data recovery harder in case of a complete failure (always make backups, no matter what file system!) so I wouldn't use it in a production server, but for a desktop or laptop OS I don't really see the problem. Using Timeshift for snapshot management as a way to sort-of emulate Windows' system restore is kind of neat and got me interested in trying it out again next time I'm reinstalling Linux. Last time I didn't have the space for snapshots, but now I do and it solves a problem I've had before (quick and easy backups after modifying system config) with ext4-based installs.

pkaye 6y ago

I've heard Facebook uses btrfs in their data center.