SUSE Continues Working On Transactional Updates With Btrfs

[waxhead]

I have had nothing be negative experiences with BTRFS and thats without a fancy setup. I recently backed up a 4TB drive to another identical drive, BTRFS used 200GB more with compression over XFS or even ZFS. No, it wastes space. Additionally whilst I haven't lost data I have often had times where the filesystem locks folders and you can't delete them etc. running it's repair tools does nothing and the only way to fix it was copy off, format and copy back. Sadly and I mean this honestly I wish it were even half as stable as FAT32 - features wise it's great but thats where it ends. I used to use openSuse and very quickly learnt to not have BTRFS as your root with that distro.

I feel this has to be challenged.
1. How much data did you copy?
2. Was it large or small files?
3. How did you find out that BTRFS did use over 200GB more than ZFS/XFS?
4. Locked directories look like they could be subvolumes as Zan Lynx said. Are they?

[untore]

Coreos (containerlinuxOS) used to ship with btrfs in the early builds but then switched to ext4+overlay not sure now, ironically coreos was acquired by red hat.
Is there a linux distro witch does the equivalent of opensuse with zfs? An Ubuntu flavor would even be OK.

[pal666]

At least redhat.

you are wrong twice. redhat didn't and redhat was already listed separately from several others

And it is totally understandable. Reliability > features.

what is totally understandable here is that you are having no clue. redhat doesn't support btrfs because redhat employs zero btrfs devs, so they just couldn't do it

Speaking as someone who fell a victim to broken filesystem after deleting some old snapshots. No it was not any raid setup or anything fancy.

i guess backups are also labeled as too fancy

Apparently less than few years back mundane things like that could still break stuff.

mundane things like that are not supported by any competing filesystem at all

[pal666]

ZFS has a similar model to btrfs,

no, zfs does not use btrees, because it was designed before invention of cow btrees. i.e. zfs is obsolete, i have no use for filesystems which can't change size (this rules out xfs as well)

ZFS is an excellent filesytem and more mature than btrfs

on solaris. but on solaris you can't choose btrfs anyway

so that can be another option, if one doesnt worrry too much about the BSD and GPL issue.

and if one doesn't worry too much about downloading some unsupported broken shit from internet

[pal666]

The reason to stay away from snapshots (for beginners) is because defrag breaks reflinks and can increase space usage significantly.

this applies only to defrag + longlived snapshots. shortlived snapshots can provide atomicity for backups etc

[pal666]

I dont understand the thinking of Fedora and the choice to go with xfs on LVM. There is no way thats better than a volume and snapshot integration into the filesystem. They say "btrfs has problems"

instead of saying "we are not btrfs devs, so we do what we can"

[pal666]

I recently backed up a 4TB drive to another identical drive, BTRFS used 200GB more with compression over XFS or even ZFS.

btrfs duplicates metadata by default even on single drive(and can duplicate data if you choose). xfs does not support raid features at all, zfs requires multiple underlying drives to give you ability to recover from bitrot via raid1 and checksums. btrfs is superior to both of them, it uses more space to protect your data. but idiots will complain

Additionally whilst I haven't lost data I have often had times where the filesystem locks folders and you can't delete them etc.

move empty bugged folder to /lost+found/ , problem solved

[brrrrttttt]

That's one thing that always scares me about Btrfs. I don't want to "set up" my filesystem. I just want it to do what it was designed to do without worrying if any of its features are going to wreck my data.

It's no more complicated than competing filesystems (ZFS)...

[patrakov]

Regarding snapper support for LVM + EXT4. As a person who used it, I would say it is a bad joke. It did save me from a long recovery procedure twice, by offering to roll back the system to a state it was in 1 hour before. But it also created two problems of its own. The issue is that in such stacked setup there is no good concept of available disk space, and if the LVM thin pool for snapshots fills up, you'll get I/O errors and filesystem corruption in the upper layers.

See https://lwn.net/Articles/747633/ for what XFS developers promise in this situation (and at least, they describe the status quo and its problems accurately).

[ZeroPointEnergy]

I don't get the people who still use something other than BTRFS or ZFS. Even if there are still some edge cases where it has problems, that is what a backup is for which you need anyway because of stuff which is a gazillion times more likely to happen like hardware failure or user errors.

On the other hand if you use EXT4 or whatever and get bitrot, which is really not uncommon when you have terabytes of data it will corrupt your backups as well and no one will ever notice until it is probably too late.