Tell me why I shouldn't use btrfs - eviltoast

About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn’t be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can’t downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn’t go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

  • Brownian Motion@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 month ago

    My setup is different to yours but not totally different. I run ESXi 8, and I started to use BTRFS on some of my VM’s.

    I had a power failure, that was longer than the UPS could handle. Most of the system shutdown safely, a few VM’s did not. All of the EXT4 VM’s were easily recovered (including another one that was XFS). TWO of the BTRFS systems crashed into a non recoverable state.

    Nothing I could do to fix them, they were just toast. I had no choice but to recover using backups. This made me highly aware that BTRFS is still not a reliable FS.

    I am migrating everything from BTRFS to something more stable and reliable like EXT4. It’s simply not worth the headache.

      • Brownian Motion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        30 days ago

        It was only a few weeks ago (maybe 4). Systems are all kept up to date with ansible. Most are Debian but there are few Ubuntu. The two that failed were both Debian.

        Granted both that failed have high [virtual] disk usage compared to the other VM’s. I cannot remember the failure now, but lots of searching confirmed that it was likely unrecoverable (they could boot, but only into read only). None of the btrfs-check “dangerous” commands could recover it, spitting out tons of errors about mismatching somethings (again, forgotten the error).