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The only filesystem I've ever completely lost to corruption was btrfs, and that was about a year ago. btrfs-restore completely failed, so if I really needed tha

by TillE 3y ago

The only filesystem I've ever completely lost to corruption was btrfs, and that was about a year ago. btrfs-restore completely failed, so if I really needed that data I guess I'd have to do some manual surgery. I got to the point in the documentation where the only recourse was "idk go ask someone on IRC". Of course if you have good backups, you can use whatever and not really worry too much about it.

cozzyd 3y ago
I had some ram fail in my laptop and that killed my btrfs filesystem. Though btrfs restore was able to recover almost everything eventually (which is good because my last backup was a few weeks before since I had been traveling). Decided to go back to boring old ext4.
mattpallissard 3y ago
I've used it extensively for many years, both professionally and personally. Historically it's been something that users needed to be paying attention to the mailing list and wikis. For the most part though, sticking to standalone or mirrored disks is pretty rock solid and has been for a long time. Ditto for subvolumes, snapshots and, send/receive. My laptop has been snapshotted and sent from one piece of hardware to the next for many years now. That said, I'm with you on the backups. Anyone who uses btrfs and doesn't have a rock solid backups is a mad man.
eternityforest 3y ago
Well, I guess that resets my "Has it been long enough since a BTRFS horror story that I can trust it" counter.
VancouverMan 3y ago
I've had the same experience the two times I've tried btrfs, about two to four years ago, in my case with Linux VMs that would occasionally be abruptly terminated. In both cases, the corruption that couldn't be automatically repaired happened within the first few of these sudden terminations. Ext4 seems to handle that scenario better. I can't think of a single instance of filesystem corruption that fsck couldn't fix, and some of those VMs have probably been abruptly terminated at least a hundred times over the years.

by TillE 3y ago

cozzyd 3y ago

I had some ram fail in my laptop and that killed my btrfs filesystem. Though btrfs restore was able to recover almost everything eventually (which is good because my last backup was a few weeks before since I had been traveling). Decided to go back to boring old ext4.

mattpallissard 3y ago

I've used it extensively for many years, both professionally and personally. Historically it's been something that users needed to be paying attention to the mailing list and wikis. For the most part though, sticking to standalone or mirrored disks is pretty rock solid and has been for a long time. Ditto for subvolumes, snapshots and, send/receive. My laptop has been snapshotted and sent from one piece of hardware to the next for many years now. That said, I'm with you on the backups. Anyone who uses btrfs and doesn't have a rock solid backups is a mad man.

eternityforest 3y ago

Well, I guess that resets my "Has it been long enough since a BTRFS horror story that I can trust it" counter.

VancouverMan 3y ago

I've had the same experience the two times I've tried btrfs, about two to four years ago, in my case with Linux VMs that would occasionally be abruptly terminated. In both cases, the corruption that couldn't be automatically repaired happened within the first few of these sudden terminations. Ext4 seems to handle that scenario better. I can't think of a single instance of filesystem corruption that fsck couldn't fix, and some of those VMs have probably been abruptly terminated at least a hundred times over the years.