About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn’t be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can’t downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn’t go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

5 points

If it didn’t give you problems, go for it. I’ve run it for years and never had issues either.

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37 points

No reason not to. Old reputations die hard, but it’s been many many years since I’ve had an issue.

I like also that btrfs is a lot more flexible than ZFS which is pretty strict about the size and number of disks, whereas you can upgrade a btrfs array ad hoc.

I’ll add to avoid RAID5/6 as that is still not considered safe, but you mentioned RAID1 which has no issues.

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2 points

I’ve been vaguely planning on using btrfs in raid5 for my next storage upgrade. Is it really so bad?

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9 points

Check status here. It looks like it may be a little better than the past, but I’m not sure I’d trust it.

An alternative approach I use is mergerfs + snapraid + snapraid-btrfs. This isn’t the best idea for a system drive, but if it’s something like a NAS it works well and snapraid-btrfs doesn’t have the write hole issues that normal snapraid does since it operates on r/o snapshots instead of raw data.

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2 points

It’s affected by the write-hole phenomenon. In BTRFS case that can mean that perfectly good old data might corrupt without any notice.

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2 points

I run it now because I wanted to try it. I haven’t had any issues. A friend recommended it as a stable option.

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56 points

A bit of topic; am I the only one that pronounces it “butterface”?

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61 points

Not anymore.

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37 points

You son of a bitch, I’m in.

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18 points

Ah feck. Not any more.

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1 point

Similarly, I read bcachefs as BCA Chefs 😅

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6 points

Isn’t it meant to be like “better FS”? So you’re not too far off.

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10 points

i call it “butter FS”

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1 point

I was meant to be Better FS, but it corrupted it to btrfs without noticing.

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2 points

I call it butter fuss. Yours is better.

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2 points

Related, and I cannot help but read “bcachefs” as “bitch café”

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2 points

Using it here. Love the flexibility and features.

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