So, I'm asking questions because I'm curious and very probably ignorant. I'm not trying to pick a fight, make points, or get in a dick-waving contest. I also do

So, I'm asking questions because I'm curious and very probably ignorant. I'm not trying to pick a fight, make points, or get in a dick-waving contest. I also don't know how closely you follow btrfs development. I skim the lists from time to time, so if I'm telling you stuff that you already know, or if my memory is not quite correct, I apologize in advance. Also, if you notice this comment after the comment submission window closes, you can reach me at $MY_HN_USERNAME@gmail What's wrong with how compression works? From a user's perspective, you either set a mount option, set a bit on a file attribute, or explicitly call for compression with btrfs defrag. [0] If you combine the latter two operations into a single checkbox, this is exactly how NTFS handles things. What am I missing here? Also, I can't agree that modern[1] btrfs handles unexpected power cuts poorly. This just hasn't been my experience. I can, however, agree that log replay isn't complete and still needs work. I can't speak to the ENOSPC bugs, I haven't run into any in a very, very long time. Some time after 3.14, btrfs got a pool of space called the "Global Reserve" [2] which was intended to address ENOSPC issues. Somewhere around that time, btrfs also grew a better btrfs-specific df function invoked with "btrfs filesystem usage". I don't make extensive use of snapshots, but the numbers I get out of btrfs fi usage almost exactly match the numbers I get from plain old df. I'm unware of snapshot automounting. Can you help me understand what this is? (A brief Google search wasn't enlightening.) I agree that taking away the ability to have subvolumes outside the FS tree if you didn't set things up just right at FS creation time is pretty bullshit. That certainly needs reworked. Everything else in my limited experience with subvol management seems okay to me. What's seems strange to you? Btrfs doesn't yet have built-in online dedup, but are you aware of dupremove? [3] Can you give me a recipe to create an N(N-1)/2 sized random access file? I use BTRFS for some very small random-access databases and large pretty-much-append-only databases and haven't run into this behavior. I have a couple of things to say about your other comment: People generally don't write to a mailing list to say what a good time they're having with your software. It's pretty shit that log replay isn't worked out yet. I certainly* don't intend to stop making backups. OTOH, I've been "getting lucky" for five years straight while running a FS that many people regard as the most untrustworthy thing in the world on a drive that many people regard as entirely unreliable and untrustworthy. :) Cheers! [0] Conceptually, this makes a lot of sense, 'cause all defrag does is re-write the file. NTFS re-writes files when you request that they be compressed, too. [1] "Modern" means btrfs from the past two years or so. [2] Much like ext*'s reserved-for-the-superuser space. [3] https://github.com/markfasheh/duperemove https://github.com/markfasheh/duperemove