I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.
- What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
- What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
- What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
btrfs with its send/receive (incremental fs-level backups) is already stable enough for mostly everything (just has some issues with raid 5/6), and is much more performant than zfs. And it is also in the linux kernel tree (quite hugely useful). Of course, if more zfs-like functionality is what you look for.
“Already stable enough”
My only experience with btrfs was when trying out Opensuse Tumbleweed. Within a couple days my home partition was busted, next time it was another partition. No idea if the problems could be fixed as these were fairly new installations to give Opensuse a try and I couldn’t be bothered to fix a system that’s troubling me from the very beginning.
Between all the options that just work ™, btrfs is the one I’ve learned to stay away from.
EDIT: that was four or five years ago
Honestly it’s not; BTRFS has been in my ‘that’s neat, but it’s still got a non-zero chance of deciding to light everything on fire because it’s bored’ list for, uh, a decade now?
The NAS build is old enough to more or less predate BTRFS being usable (closing in on a decade since I did the initial OS install, jeez) and none of the features matter for what I’m storing: if every drive in my NAS died today, I’d be very annoyed for a couple of hours during the rebuild, and would lose terrabytes of linux ISOs that I can just download again, if I wanted to use Jellyfin to install them a 2nd time. (Any data I care about is pulled offsite at least once a day, so I’ve got pretty comprehensive backups minus the ISOs.)
I know EXT4 and mergerfs and snapraid are not cool, or have shiny features, but I’ve also had zero problems with them over the last decade, even between Ubuntu upgrades (16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 22.04) and hardware platform upgrades (6600k, 8700k, 10950k) and the entire replacement of all the system drives (hdd -> ssd -> nvme) and the expansion of and replacement of dead HDDs, of varying sizes (4tb drives to 8tb drives to 16tb drives to some 20tb drives).
It all just… worked, and at no point was I concerned about the filesystem not working if I replaced or upgraded or changed something, which is not something ZFS or BTRFS would have guaranteed during that same time window.
IMHO 99% of the time btrfs features are used as a band-aid for things that would be much better done otherwise. Generally by using a stable distro and a decent backup solution (like Debian + Borg). And you get to use a truly stable, proven, boring fs ike ext4 or xfs.
Stable yes, but no protection from bitrot, and the journal of ext4 is the band aid, instead of a cow fs like zfs or btrfs.
You can protect important data with backups, which you should do anyway, and in practice I feel like the added complexity of BTRFS and ZFS is not worth the COW.
BTRFS is cool but they tried to cram way too much too fast into it and it added a ton of complexity and it’s still not 100% done after all these years. A COW mode for ext4 would have been adopted much faster.