Is BTRFS worth switching to from EXT4?
 

Pretty much the title. Also what packages do I need exactly? I can't find the BTRFS-Convert package or any of the other ones, just the BTRFS-Progs.

I have a bad experience with BTRFS. Luckily, I make daily backups from my laptop to other PC, so I did not lose all my data.

You have GParted, which can act as a GUI front-end to btrfs-progs.

.

Yes, totally yes. BTRFS gives you the ability to make incremental backups easily. You can move your rootfs into a snapshot and literally do things like upgrade the entire distro while being about to boot into your current system exactly as is! If you use LXC you can easily make space efficient snapshots / clones of containers.

IMHO its a game changer.

So it's worth it then? How unstable is it exactly?

Also how exactly do I go about converting? Within the install dvd?

:twocents: I've been installing with it for years now, no issues.

After backups, this may help : http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/...ition-or-drive
on moving rather than a reinstal? :hattip:

I have been using it since Slackware 14 was released. I would say its perfectly usable. I have been running it in a RAID configuration as well. If you want to boot into a snapshot you have to fiddle with your initrd a bit, edit the mount line in init so you can pass the subvolume id and than rebuild the image. Other than that pretty simple. If you are using the huge kernel without an initrd I am not sure you are going to be able to boot into a subvolume, but people really should switch to the generic kernel anyway.

I have one big volume with snapshots for 'root' and 'home' just so I can separate the backups, but space is still shared. I also use a tiny ext4 partition 100MB on the first disk for Lilo to read the kernel and initrd image from. Keeping the old snapshots bootable is basically as simple as building a new initrd (for the new snap) and adding an other entry in the lilo config.

The BTRFS tools work well, send backups have been working well for a while now. I think you will be happy.

This is a good article that will teach you how everything works. You can try stuff out using loop back files so you have a feel for the tools:
http://www.funtoo.org/BTRFS_Fun

Ugh that looks overly complicated. I'm not even going to bother if i just can't convert my already existing ext4 partitions. I have no need for backups of any kind, mainly because I just don't have the space and I make sure never to do anything too crazy. I really don't have any interest in making loop devices either, why should I even bother putting all my drives into one big volume? I don't need to and that's why I've never bothered with RAID.

Plus my home and root are on the same partition, and it's a terabyte drive and I don't have any others to back it up too. Ugghh should've just installed with BTRFS when I had the chance.

I initially converted from ext4 to btrfs when I went for 13.37 to 14.0 but according to the wiki that isn't well tested on the 4.x kernels

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index....sion_from_Ext3

using the filesystem is not especially complicated. I would not get discouraged. You could probably copy your existing system over with tar, worst case.

Absolutely agree with @chemfire.

What harm can come from using an unstable FS honestly? That seems like such a weird concept to me, like how can a File System of all things be unstable? IDK I guess I'll figure it out.

Raid 0/1 seems fairly stable. The only issues I found with it was that the system had a tendency to hang if the btrfs filesystem was exported via NFS.

Really bad experience with Raid 5. It SHOULD have been self recovering - but even the file recovery tools didn't work The btrfs recovery tools claimed the filesystem couldn't be mounted, yet the system had no trouble mounting the filesystem - and the recovery tools don't work if the filesystem IS mounted by the system (though that was expected, they are offline tools).

Btrfs shows LOTS of promise - but until it gets more debugging, and a LOT more reliable, I won't use it.

In my case, 2/3 of the files were corrupted. Nothing catastrophic (they were just backups of DVDs), but it took a LONG time to rebuild. MD raid works well, and has good recovery characteristics - though you have to do more manual interaction for recovery. I tested the same failure mode as with btrfs - all that was necessary was to fail out the damaged drive, and re-add it. System recovered normally - though final recovery took a while (rebuilding time).

And I have all my photos on RAID5. Never had an issue.

But I'm anal about backups ...

File system developed around 2008ish?: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist....omponent=btrfs

2006ish?: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/buglist....=File%20System :eek:

Been using it for a while on my home directory. I switched from ext4 because I wanted snapshots. Works well with encryption as well. Still using ext4 for my root because btrfs does not handle running out of space on the root partition well. And by not well I mean catastrophically bad.

Yup. Too many bugs still. And using it for /home? not a chance. Did for a while (raid 1), but I got off of it after a month due to random hangs.

btrfs is a very complex filesystem that (IMO) is a bit TOO complex. With all the checksums and error detection - it REALLY REALLY should detect single disk errors (and rebuild them if the disk isn't flagged bad). It doesn't. It also doesn't do NFS very well either.