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I know, questions like this have been asked before, but I'd like to get some up to date experiences.. From what I've read in various discussions, BTRFS seems like it's relatively stable, but once in a lifetime, with some kind of an upgrade it breaks (don't know how old this info is...). I'm sure, many of you are using BTRFS right now and I'd like to switch to it too, I'd just like to know if YOU consider it stable, had any problems with it, and, well, would you trust it to handle your.... let's say semester project?

TrailRider
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IcyIcyIce
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4 Answers4

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I use btrfs for years now and there are situations in which I can not recommend using it. When losing power or shutting down unctrollably, the risk of irreparable damage is high. When the hard disk is operated in nearly full state, sporadic malfunctions may happen and the displayed free space and the usable space may differ strongly. When juggling with big amounts of snapshots, there are rare situations in which data gets inaccessible. Some mechanisms as the deduplication, filesystem repair and scrubbing are systematcally broken.

All that does not appear too good after so many years of development, and I do not have the impression that the situation will improve. btrfs can be used for special purposes, but under no circumstances I would entrust critical data to it.

Klaus-J. Wolf
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On the BTRFS Wiki you can find companies that are using it in production or testing it in production so out of the development/testing/staging stages.

So you can use it for your semester project as long as you don't forget to make back-ups!

(But you are making back-ups already, aren't you?)

Community
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Fabby
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4

I'm using it on a pretty small SSD. In general it works quite well and I'll keep it, but wouldn't recommend it to an inexperienced user. However, maybe due to the limited space, I have the impression that it slows my system down a bit (compared to ext4). But the main downside is the need for balancing, which must be done regularly if you don't want to end up with a broken system (that you can recover, but still...). While the balancing is running, the computer is noticeably slower. Greatest advantage (in particular when e.g. writing a thesis as I currently do) are the snapshot capabilities. I use snapper for hourly backups, such that I can recover from recent mistakes of my own. Of course that doesn't replace external backups.

To summarize, if you like trying out new stuff and aren't afraid of small difficulties, you should try it. Do backups, of course, although l haven't experienced any data loss in the last few months since I started using it.

Edit: This is the blog post l followed to recover my system after I had forgotten to balance it often enough.

Edit 2: Snapper is a tool from SuSE to manage BTRFS snapshots. The version from the Ubuntu repository has no GUI, but the command line interface is sufficient.

Edit 3: answering the comment to another answer: I started using BTRFS while 15.04 was beta, hence there has been a lot of kernel updates. I haven't noticed any problems with them.

Edit 4: as pointed out in the comments, the general speed issue probably occurred when the disk got too full. Balancing was always slow, though.

luckyrumo
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I used it on my personal laptop and desktop at work on SSD for the last few years. So far I hadn't experienced any problems or data loss, but then again this is not a server type of workload.

Disk format is stable enough for me during the period I used it, I hadn't had a kernel upgrade causing any data losses or difficulties.

Things I like about BTRFS:

  • I have had my skin saved because apt automatically creates a btrfs snapshot before major system upgrades
  • I was able to convert an ext4 filesystem to btrfs in place. In production servers, I would have taken a full system backup first, but in local systems I don't have enough space to make full backups. Not making a full backup before major operations is not a good idea, but fortunately all goes well for me, no hitch. Just don't forget to delete the ext snapshot once you're confident of the conversion or your CoW space will keep growing.
  • the btrfs command line interface is IMO, one of the best and most intuitive filesystem command line interface. All the advanced features of btrfs seems accessible and the btrfs wiki fills in the details.
Lie Ryan
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