It Looks Like There's A Possible Data Corruption Bug For Btrfs Dating Back To 2009

[Passso]

I personally stay true to RAID's acronym (RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks ), so I field used disks bought from Ebay for cheap, as I can afford to lose them (being in a RAID) and I use btrfs/ZFS/Snapraid on them so even if they are relatively more likely to corrupt data (being not new) any corruption is detected and fixed.
So far it's going well (I usually prey on used crappy NAS sold with their drives still inside), but don't try this at home lol.

Agreed.

@serafean: whatever is your budget, a 1TB disk now costs nothing (50$) and will save your whole digital life one day or another.

I personaly have an old laptop used only for backup and watch movies/youtube, I simply run a rsync at startup on all other devices at home and voilà.

[starshipeleven]

If someone wants to get hyped up about btrfs, it seems there are new patches that address some of the big issues of RAID5/6 (like scrub fucking up hard the filesystem)
[PATCH 0/3 for-4.10] RAID56 scrub fixes
Fixes 2 scrub bugs:
1) Scrub recover correct data, but wrong parity
2) Scrub report wrong csum error number, or even unrecoverable error

http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-btrfs/msg61362.html

[caligula]

My dataset is in the range of TB. I simply do not have the financial capacity to buy multiple times the same size...

You're doing something wrong. If it's content produced by yourself, if it's your daily work, the work should be able to pay your gear. If it's a hobby, you've just voluntarily chosen a hobby that's too expensive for you. If it's pirated content from web or backups from dvd/bluray, it's not how they should be used. Besides, in some countries ripping the content is illegal due to DMCA and similar laws. You should also considering archiving stuff instead of using RAID. There are 8-12 TB archive drives now.

[Luke]

If you have no backups you WILL lose all your data no matter what drives, no matter what FS you use. You will then find it very inexpensive to backup the small amounts of new data you create going forward. This is so severe that if you cannot get a hard drive big enough to copy all your files too, you should get or use the biggest you have/can get and back up your files in order of importance if lost. Then treat the rest of the data as expendable-or even trash some of the data that is not all that important if it allows simpler, whole fs backups.

I too have a multi-TB filesystem, I've had plenty of disks go bad, filesystems get hosed, even once a wrong-disk secure erase. In all cases, I restored from backup. Last time around it took over ten hours disk to disk.

Cloud backup is worthless for this sort of thing. Aside from the privacy issues, I would have to have 100mB/s steady bandwidth to push or pull such data at the same rate I can disk to disk, I am lucky to get 100kB/S so cloud is utterly out of the question. I do not control my own house, cannot set up any utilities so don't advise cable Internet. I can buy a 2TB hard drive for less than one of those cable companies would want for high-end service for one month around here however.