Hello everyone,
I am gonna setup a backup pc in the office ice i work for.. and I was thinking of trying btrfs on it.

what do I have:
2x 150GB drives (sda) on a raid card (raid 1)for the OS (slack 13.37)
2x 2TB drives (sdb) on that same raid card (raid 1, too)
2x 1.5TB drives (sdc,sdd) directly attached to MoBo
2x 750GB drives (sde,sdf) attached to MoBo too.

if i got about it the normal way, i'd create softRAID 1 out of the the 1.5TB and the 750GB drives and LVM all the data arrays (2TB+1.5TB+750GB) to get a unified disk.

If I use btrfs will I be able to do the same?
I mean I have read how to create raid arrays with mkfs.btrfs and that some lvm capability is incorporated in the filesystem. but will it understand what I want it to do, if i just say

probably not, eh?

Also how stable of a filesystem are we talking about?
Has anyone tried it and had serious data corruption?

Thank you for your help

I think you'll need to create different filesystems. It's not like LVM - filesystems don't live in a "container" (vg). You want to expand a filesystem, you just add partitions/devices at it.
I did some testing with raid10, but it didn't recover properly when a device was failed deliberately (was a while back).

I use btrfs on all my non-production systems. I don't use it on any production system.
Your data, your choice.

As far as I know, btrfs is not yet supported by fsck, so if you get into difficulties there may not be a way to get out.

Incidentally, Fedora will make btrfs their default this autumn: you may think that's an aweful warning!

I personally wouldn't trust it with sensitive data that has no other backups.
However, I'm currently using it wrong as it is running on an LVM that is on an encrypted partition and it works fine. The only issue with either of those is that you can't use the seed feature when the device is mounted as a loop device.... I don't know if this was fixed in the later kernels.

Anyway, btrfs has it's own raid features as well as its own Volume Management capabilities. I know that you can always add another partition to an existing file system... but safely removing it might be a different matter completely. I don't know exactly how its raid features work...

Anyway the best way to start with brtfs is start playing with it to see if it works the way you want it to.

Also remember that it's not designed to have independent file systems on really small partitions. It's more aimed at expandable storage. I believe there are plans for subvolume quotas, but that is not implemented yet.

Also the odd thing is that you can have sub sub volumes and at any one time, a parent or sub volume can be mounted on the system. A sub volume appears just like a regular folder to the system.

If you install the main OS onto a btr file system, be sure to install it to a subvolume so that you can better manage snapshots.

Also, set the default sub volume to that one or it will mount the root volume by default.