Linux users,
Why don’t you use btrfs?
Why do you prefer ext4 or even ZFS?
Boost appreciated!
Discussion
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The answers to this are basically of two types:
1. I don’t care; I just use whatever the default is, and the default is ext4 (which only begs the question, because why are distros still using ext4 by default?)
This surprises me, because essentially what people don’t care about about is … the software responsible for accurately storing and retrieving every bit of their personal data
Journaling alone made things a bit more reliable, but I personally will never use a non-CoW filesystem again
2. ZFS is more reliable and easier to administrate than btrfs
This really surprises me.
For the record, I was a FreeBSD user on my servers until a couple of years ago when I switched – mostly in order to be able to use Nix on the server as well as on my Mac. On FreeBSD, I always used ZFS, even when ZFS root was still a bit awkward to set up. (See also: I do not trust my data on non-CoW filesystems.)
But until I asked today, the only stories I had heard of ZFS on Linux were pretty negative.
Mostly, admittedly, to do with the fact that ZFS on Linux has (had?) to be loaded in separately from an external source, and sometimes there were problems with kernel upgrades, etc.
ZFS on FreeBSD was always rock solid for me once set up, and as far as I recall, I never heard of any actual data corruption issues on Linux either.
However, my experiences with btrfs have been generally that I find it easier to administer than ZFS.
For example, in btrfs you can set properties like transparent compression for a directory you own without being root. At least on FreeBSD that wasn’t possible, because you had to create a separate subvolume and set the mount properties of it to achieve that – which required root privileges.
Resizing a zpool was also quite hard, and the fact that the btrfs documentation at least made it *sound* easier also made me feel like btrfs was a safer choice
Dumbass of the day prizes go to:
the person who tried btrfs ‘20 years ago’ (in 2006 it wasn’t even created yet, and anything like 20 years ago it was probably still unstable – it wasn’t even stable on-disk till 2013) and had data corruption and vowed never to use it again. newsflash: unstable software is unstable and will break on you
the person who showed me the lines of code count for ext4 vs btrfs and said ‘look! it’s much simpler!’ reliability is a feature, and features cost code
Oh, and btrfs also seems to be much less of a memory hog than ZFS
Anyway, I’m certainly not a btrfs fangirl. It seems to have significant issues when available disk space is low – a problem I’ve personally run into.
But I wonder how much of the reluctance to use it stems from that long development period when it was unstable, even though it’s now in production all over the place. The fact that some features are shipping but still considered unstable (RAID 5/6) also likely doesn’t help
Maybe this isn’t the best development model for a file system.
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@dpk I keep reading bad things about btrfs failures, and OTOH I have decades of good experiences with ext4 (and lvm and raid) as an allrounder FS, and ZFS for cases where I need the extra features (checksumming, and snapshot sending). Also, btrfs, apart from the minor convenience of not needing extra installation like ZFS, doesn't seem to offer any benefits, so why risk my data?
@dpk btrfs has absolutely aweful multi device handling when I had to replace a broken disk, which caused the process to take about a week to replace the disk.
zfs handles the exact same problem in about 5 minutes plus resync time.
It's been about 10 years, but btrfs really burnt me.