cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4274796
Just wanted to share some love for this filesystem.
I’ve been running a btrfs raid1 continuously for over ten years, on a motley assortment of near-garbage hard drives of all different shapes and sizes. None of the original drives are still in it, and that server is now on its fourth motherboard. The data has survived it all!
It’s grown to 6 drives now, and most recently survived the runtime failure of a SATA controller card that four of them were attached to. After replacing it, I was stunned to discover that the volume was uncorrupted and didn’t even require repair.
So knock on wood — I’m not trying to tempt fate here. I just want to say thank you to all the devs for their hard work, and add some positive feedback to the heap since btrfs gets way more than it’s fair share of flak, which I personally find to be undeserved. Cheers!
My experience says otherwise.
Ext4 is rock solid and will survive power loss without a problem.
I love btrfs for the compression and snapshot capabilities, but it still has a long way to go to reach ext4 maturity.
That’s not a shot at btrfs, it’s just that filesystem maturity and reliability take time.
I can’t share your enthusiasm about Ext4’s safety. I’ve had multiple disks lost to simple power failures at home and more complex hardware failures at datacenters. At the time I migrated to XFS - which also always performed better than Ext4 when things failed - and then moved to BTRFS when become mostly stable.