this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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i've instaled opensuse tumbleweed a bunch of times in the last few years, but i always used ext4 instead of btrfs because of previous bad experiences with it nearly a decade ago. every time, with no exceptions, the partition would crap itself into an irrecoverable state

this time around i figured that, since so many years had passed since i last tried btrfs, the filesystem would be in a more reliable state, so i decided to try it again on a new opensuse installation. already, right after installation, os-prober failed to setup opensuse's entry in grub, but maybe that's on me, since my main system is debian (turns out the problem was due to btrfs snapshots)

anyway, after a little more than a week, the partition turned read-only in the middle of a large compilation and then, after i rebooted, the partition died and was irrecoverable. could be due to some bad block or read failure from the hdd (it is supposedly brand new, but i guess it could be busted), but shit like this never happens to me on extfs, even if the hdd is literally dying. also, i have an ext4 and an ufs partition in the same hdd without any issues.

even if we suppose this is the hardware's fault and not btrfs's, should a file system be a little bit more resilient than that? at this rate, i feel like a cosmic ray could set off a btrfs corruption. i hear people claim all the time how mature btrfs is and that it no longer makes sense to create new ext4 partitions, but either i'm extremely unlucky with btrfs or the system is in fucking perpetual beta state and it will never change because it is just good enough for companies who can just, in the case of a partition failure, can just quickly switch the old hdd for a new one and copy the nightly backup over to it

in any case, i am never going to touch btrfs ever again and i'm always going to advise people to choose ext4 instead of btrfs

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I had some trouble with ZFS and kernel compatibility when upgrading the OS, so I switched to btrfs. It's been fine for 3 years now, including a kernel upgrade.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I literally daily drive btrfs. Just don't use a crappy drive or use raid5/raid6.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

BTRFS RAID5/6 is fine as long you don't run into a scenario where your machine crashes and there was still unwritten data in the cache. Also write performance sucks and scrubbing takes an eternity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Just do a search on your favorite search engine for "btrfs raid5/6 write hole bug" and you'll see. If power gets cut, any file on the set of disks could be missing, or just have bunch of garbage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's literally what I'm saying; It's fine as long as there wasn't any unwritten data in the cache when the machine crashes/suddenly loses power. RAID controllers have a battery backed write cache for this reason, because traditional RAID5/6 has the same issue.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I switched to XFS.

The most important feature to me is support for file deduction which is supported by XFS through reflink. BTRFS supports reflinks as well.

Snapshot in BTRFS seems like the most desirable feature, but in real life I ended up not using it.

I usually prefer drive mirror setup, but it can give its own headaches.

These days I simply have 2 disks and nightly rsync job copies content of one drive to another. This protects from drive failure.

Rclone job sends most important data to offsite backup.

The biggest loss is missing data checksums, but it is a unique feature of BTRFS that most filesystems manage without.

I don’t have setup to expand partition beyond one drive. It comes with its own headache. I simply use large enough disks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I have had small issues with btrfs over the years, but nothing like the dataloss issues people reported a few years back that the devs supposedly fixed. Its scrubbing mechanism doesn't work great, and the failure modes on RAID are fucking goofy. I wouldn't trust it for raid at all, and they've never really fixed the bugs that have been exposed over the years.

Frankly, it does everything worse than ZFS except for be in the kernel. DKMS isn't that hard and I've never had a ZFS build hook fail. The only thing I use btrfs for is cattle computers that I can nuke and pave at will, and most of those could use ext4 just fine, but that's what Fedora uses by default and I can't be arsed to partition manually.

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