Why I've sworn off btrfs: mismatch with fs_devices

[LionelBouton]

The shitshow started when trying to use USB drives on a NUC... Why should BTRFS be expected to work on unreliable hardware with drives suddenly garbage on disk ? Maybe another filesystem would work longer on a single drive but in these conditions instead of failing loudly early and allowing to recover data like Btrfs did here (and from the abuse it got it was quite a feat) it would silently corrupt data maybe to the point where the eventual failure would mean a substantial portion of the content would be lost too.

[SEngelsg]

I have run BTRFS since 2013 on my own machine, on some of my servers and on another server that I administrate. Never had a single issue with it once it is set up correctly. It have saved me from failing disks and corruptions several times. Other filesystem may fit your use better, but if you know how to use BTRFS and stay away from experimental features it works just as advertised.

[kbabioch]

You shouldn't be surprised about the btrfs codebase being bigger than ext4, given that btrfs is way more complex and offers much more features. I wouldn't like to miss out on those features (compression, snapshots, send/receive, checksums, etc.). ext4 may give you less headaches, but you never know if your data is still valid. Underpowered USB hardware can lead to all sorts of problems, with btrfs you are only noticing it first. That said btrfs is everything but perfect. The code is not reliable in the "edge" cases, and a lot of tooling to help you out in these kind of situations is still missing.

By the way: Not sure if mounting with an older kernel is a good idea. It might do the trick to get your data off a last time, but in general it tends to screw things up badly.

[AvindraGoolcharan]

You have to regularly run rebalance jobs or else your filesystem will fill up. Note that with the rebalance, you will have to use a progressively higher number with a few successive passes.

[andresotondo]

I tried btrfs in my Desktop (Debian stable), and started to behave so weird. The performance was bad, Steam just run awful.

[MusicalDistractions]

I was gonna start playing around with btrfs now that I've switched over to linux but after seeing this and other comments, maybe not. I have such a hard time wrapping my head around different file systems. Just seems like something newer would be worth using because solid state hardware wasn't much of a thing back when the older systems were put together.

[gregzeng]

All my archive and data partitions are in Microsoft NTFS-compressed formats. Undelete, defrag etc are done by Windows. All my Linux systems work OK.

[alphabennyrosy]

You ever gonna play around with btrfs again, or are you never going to use it again?

[skJOYmopt]

Hey kai, how much battery life are you getting on your laptop with linux ?

[nextlifeonearth]

You're using an older version (I guess you figured it out by now).
Do tell tho: did you fix it/give a newer version another go?

[Ultrajamz]

Ext4 for at least another 10 years imho.. dont need the extra bells and whistles

[DesktopChronicles]

Why not invest on a good quality NAS or even a DIY NAS/FreeNAS server and at the same time sync everything to glacier? You will have availability and peace of mind with both local and off-site backups. Despite the filesystem, I really don't think that a NUC with two underpowered external usb drives could be considered a trusted solution imho, even for home use. I personally use a Synology DS716+II with Btrfs for over two months now, it is very stable and I am very happy with my purchase. Just saying...

[Bitwise]

That's really disheartening. I've been waiting a long time for btrfs to be ready for prime time. :0/

[terranrepublican]

You should use XFS because you have a lot of fucking data...