An unexpected setback
Added 2021-11-18 02:26:05 +0000 UTCThe last week was far from the best time of my life.
Comments
It's difficult, I think Btrfs has some issues with recovering from what should be a simple problem. Overall I think it's good and many a company uses it for massive data storage. It definitely has some flaws (in the design and disk format, as pointed out by the Bcachefs creator), and it has performance bottlenecks when reaching extreme conditions like 1000s of snapshots or very low free disk space. But I think it's still a viable option. It just requires backups. Like everything else. Backup or suffer!
unfa
2021-11-18 18:40:53 +0000 UTCI've had a few "duh" moments with Btrfs, not sure if I didn't mess up myself. It also saved me a lot of time and pain in some instances, so it's difficult to say if it's worth the hassle. I'm staying with it for now. When Bcachefs becomes a viable alternative I'll start testing that (on non-crucial data, and keeping backups on another drive and FS).
unfa
2021-11-18 18:38:17 +0000 UTCWell, because part of my work is testing the newest software and I can't maintain two computers or two OSes, I have to balance that.
unfa
2021-11-18 18:36:29 +0000 UTCBy the way, unfa, the working horse should be reliable. That's the first law, which I understood a long time ago. At first I also been experimenting with different Linux distros, until finally, 6-7 years ago, settled down to Debian stable on the "no more broken s***t!" principle. And do not regret ever since. I know a few people consider Debian stable a good choice for desktop, but in fact it is! It works flawlessly and never lets down at the least unexpected moment. For the latest app versions I use Flatpak, Appimages and packages from the official backports repo. Plus, if I really want something extra fresh, I simply compile it myself. But at least the very system is always rock stable.
Andrey Pivovarov
2021-11-18 10:20:11 +0000 UTCAhhhh... btrfs... I also trusted it for quite some time. But couple of years ago also experienced problems with my home server. Never use it since then, just the good old plain ext4.
Andrey Pivovarov
2021-11-18 10:13:02 +0000 UTCOh-no! I did a fresh install on my multi-media-machine, recently, and I already wondered if btrfs is a good joice (performance wise) for this kind of workload. But now it seems to me, btrfs is just not as stable as good old ext4. Read on phoronix, there is some tweaking going on reguarding kernel/btrfs - so I hope your filesystem crash has nothing to do with it. The raid-, timeshift- and compressing-features of btrfs are killer, but stability is certainly the one top-feature we users can't get around. So, I guess, I'm better off sticking with ext4 (or xfs) where data is important. Lesson 2: Timeshift can't keep you from taking backups. I also hope it's just time you have to spend and not so much data was lost! Anyway: Best wishes from me!
Mitsch
2021-11-18 08:28:34 +0000 UTC
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