tell me your experience using zfs/btrfs - eviltoast

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/9319044

Hey,

I am planning to implement authenticated boot inspired from Pid Eins’ blog. I’ll be using pam mount for /home/user. I need to check integrity of all partitions.

I have been using luks+ext4 till now. I am hesistant hesitant to switch to zfs/btrfs, afraid I might fuck up. A while back I accidently purged ‘/’ trying out timeshift which was my fault.

Should I use zfs/btrfs for /home/user? As for root, I’m considering luks+(zfs/btrfs) to be restorable to blank state.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Many many years ago I set up btrfs for the disks I write my backups to with a raid 1 config for them. Unfortunately one of those disks went bad and ended up corrupting the whole array. Makes me wonder if I set it up correctly or not.

    Nowadays, I have the following disks in my system set up as btrfs:

    • My backups disk because of compression.
    • My OS drive because of Timeshift.
    • My home folder because it feels safer. COW feels like it’ll handle power failures better, whilst there’s also checksumming so I can identify corrupted files.
    • My SSD Steam library over two drives because life is short and I cba managing the two ssds independently.

    It’s going fine, but it feels like I need to manually run a balance every one in a while when the disk fills up.

    I also like btrfs-assistant for managing the devices.

    Out of interest, since I’ve not used the “recommended partion setup” for any install for a while now, is ext4 still the default on most distros?

    • waigl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      Out of interest, since I’ve not used the “recommended partion setup” for any install for a while now, is ext4 still the default on most distros?

      I recently installed Nobara Linux on an additional drive, because after 20 years, I wanted to give Linux gaming another shot (works a lot better than I had hopes for, btw), and it defaulted to btrfs. I’ll assume so does Fedora, because I cannot imagine Nobara changed that part over the Fedora base for gaming purposes.

      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        Fedora does, with compression enabled. It’s one of the largest divergences from Red Hat since Red Hat doesn’t support it at all. openSUSE does also.

    • Quazatron@lemmy.world
      3·
      9 months ago

      My SSD Steam library over two drives because life is short and I cba managing the two ssds independently.

      You do know that Steam handles multiple libraries transparently, even on removable drives?

      • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        I know they all show up in the same interface and I can move games between drives in the storage interface.

        But I don’t want to deal with having to shuffle things around to install a 40GiB game where both drives only have 30GiB free. Or having to remember which of the two drives has a specific game on when I want to find their files.

        It also gives a possibly-insignificant speed boost and extra cool points.

      • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
        2·
        9 months ago

        This was ages ago, so I can’t really remember I’m afraid. I think maybe the files themselves were corrupted, not the folder structure, so perhaps? Although I can see that as a thing I forget to do though.