cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4274796

Just wanted to share some love for this filesystem.

I’ve been running a btrfs raid1 continuously for over ten years, on a motley assortment of near-garbage hard drives of all different shapes and sizes. None of the original drives are still in it, and that server is now on its fourth motherboard. The data has survived it all!

It’s grown to 6 drives now, and most recently survived the runtime failure of a SATA controller card that four of them were attached to. After replacing it, I was stunned to discover that the volume was uncorrupted and didn’t even require repair.

So knock on wood — I’m not trying to tempt fate here. I just want to say thank you to all the devs for their hard work, and add some positive feedback to the heap since btrfs gets way more than it’s fair share of flak, which I personally find to be undeserved. Cheers!

  • @lloram239@feddit.de
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    511 months ago

    Same experience for me, except without the RAID. It’s the only file system I ever used that just worked and didn’t self destruct. With ext234 I always ended up with all my files scattered in lost+found sooner or later. In the early days XFS couldn’t handle system crashes without deleting important files and I even managed to corrupt ZFS on an USB drive. Never had anything catastrophic happen with BTRFS, quite the opposite, it warned me of broken RAM or drives a few times.

    That said, BTRFS can get a bit finicky when it gets full. It has gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s a situation that one should better avoid.