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I've been using btrfs on several machines for about 3 years. It is not stable: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_status https://btrf

I've been using btrfs on several machines for about 3 years. It is not stable: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page#Stability_... When it goes wrong (about every 4 months for me), you will end up in a nightmare. Generally attempts to fix issues will make things worse, various tools and pages contradict each other, and the devs are only interested in the latest kernel version. Much of this is deliberate - the code is written to not sweep things under the rug, which means you can hit problems and not recover. Use backups and make sure you can restore. The reason why I keep using it is because there is no silent corruption as you get with ext4. A scrub can verify every byte of data is unaltered and recover if using anything other than single profile. Compression, volume management, cheap snapshots etc also make working with it nice. Until things go wrong. The single biggest "going wrong" is running out of space. Copy on write filesystems by their nature leave existing content alone and write new information in the spare space, eventually doing a garbage collect of obsolete data. When you are out of space that gets rather difficult with bizarre symptoms and tricky recovery.

discardorama 12y ago
Thanks! Luckily, I hadn't done much more than just installing Ubuntu, so now I'm reinstalling it, this time with EXT4 :)
- rogerbinns 12y ago
  Just be aware that other filesystems like ext4 do not checksum their data. They have no way of telling if corruption has happened, nor are the diagnostics useful if you do somehow figure out that a block is problematic. This has happened to me several times over the decades as hard drives have lost the plot, or due to bugs. Backing up a corrupted file gets you nonsense in the backup. (A standard btrfs demo is deliberately corrupting the filesystem and then showing recovery. You can't do that with ext4 since it has no idea if what is there is correct in the first place.) You can use tools like LVM and md as a layer underneath ext4 to provide some resiliency, but there is a learning curve and two sets of tools to work with. Changing around disk/partition sizes isn't much fun with them.

discardorama 12y ago

Thanks! Luckily, I hadn't done much more than just installing Ubuntu, so now I'm reinstalling it, this time with EXT4 :)

rogerbinns 12y ago
Just be aware that other filesystems like ext4 do not checksum their data. They have no way of telling if corruption has happened, nor are the diagnostics useful if you do somehow figure out that a block is problematic. This has happened to me several times over the decades as hard drives have lost the plot, or due to bugs. Backing up a corrupted file gets you nonsense in the backup. (A standard btrfs demo is deliberately corrupting the filesystem and then showing recovery. You can't do that with ext4 since it has no idea if what is there is correct in the first place.) You can use tools like LVM and md as a layer underneath ext4 to provide some resiliency, but there is a learning curve and two sets of tools to work with. Changing around disk/partition sizes isn't much fun with them.