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.
Well yeah, because it’s supposed to replace those lower levels.
Also, BTRFS does provide advantages over ext4, such as snapshots, which I think are fantastic since I can recover if things go sideways. I don’t know what your use-case is, so I don’t know if the features BTRFS provides would be valuable to you.
Generally, if a lower level can do a thing, I prefer to have the lower level do it. It’s not really a reason, just a rule of thumb. I like to think that the lower level is more efficient to do the thing.
I use LVM snapshots to do my backups. I don’t have any other reason for it.
That all being said, I’m using btrfs on one system and if I really like it, I may migrate to it. It does seem a whole lot simpler to have one thing to learn than all the layers.
Yup, I used to use LVM, but the two big NAS filesystems have a ton of nice features and they expect to control the disk management. I looked into BTRFS and ZFS, and since BTRFS is native to Linux (some of my SW doesn’t support BSD) and I don’t need anything other than RAID mirror, that’s what I picked.
I used LVM at work for simple RAID 0 systems where long term uptime was crucial and hardware swaps wouldn’t likely happen (these were treated like IOT devices), and snapshots weren’t important. It works well. But if you want extra features (file-level snapshots, compression, volume quotas, etc), BTRFS and ZFS make that way easier.
I am interested in compression. I may give it a try when I swap out my desktop system. I did try btrfs in it’s early, post alpha stage, but found that the support was not ready yet. I think I had a VM system that complained. It is older now and more mature and maybe it’s worth another look.