Btrfs gets a bad rap sometimes but I have been using it for years and it works very well. It is able to take failing hardware and power outages and still has good performance.
For those without knowledge: Alternatives to BTRFS are what? EXT4 or NTFS?
Mostly ZFS, XFS and ext4
Correct, btrfs is a filesystem format.
What are the alternatives to it? NTFS? EXT4? ExFAT? FAT32??
xfs. ext4 doesn’t have a comparable feature set, and nobody is going to use those others as their main filesystems on Linux. bcachefs will be a contender, once it’s included in the kernel, or if you’re the sort who compiles their own kernels.
The only file-system that is somewhat comparable to btrfs is OpenZFS. Xfs isn’t.
Yeah, zfs is what I meant. Or yfs, as in “Y-use anything but btr-FS?”
Seems like zfs or btrfs?
At least I usually read about storage file system usually being ZFS by default.ZFS has been around for a long time. Rock solid w RAID. See FreeNAS. ZFS was orig on BSD but AFAIK got ported to Linux a while back.
It now TrueNAS and both freebsd and Linux use the same implementation (openzfs)
Agreed, I switched over from OpenZFS to btrfs and while it does lack some more advanced features, using btrfs for raid1 disk pools has been a very solid and hassle free experience.
Yes BTRFS is really good and solid. Usually survives hardware failure much better than the EXT* crap. And sub volumes and snapshots, damn finally a modern filesystem.
To be honest, I don’t see a benefit for btrfs (or zfs). I prefer plain ext4 (no LVM). It’s simpler and faster. I have no need for snapshots. Proxmox handles my vms and my working machines are just a collection of dot files… But that’s just me. It’s good that there are choices.
Ext4 is slower than btrfs
It’s been a while since I looked at benchmarks (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems). It could be these days.
I’ve used Proxmox in the past w it, worked okie. One crazy hypervisor, ton of features. I mostly stick w VMware, it just works. My uptime is measured in years.
Well I’ll never get a uptime like they in proxmox cause I update.
You can do the same thing with proxmox.
The benefit of proxmox is that it is libre and uses Linux components.
My anecdotal experience with btrfs is that it constantly broke in raid 1, no problems with any other filesystems on the exact same hardware and setup. YMMV
How long ago was that? Modern btrfs is pretty stable.
Last year, unraid, identical SSDs. I changed so many sata and power cables, so many settings.
I love it for single drives, but for RAID, ZFS all the way.
ZFS also supports single drives, is there a reason to use btrfs instead?
IIRC it works with TimeShift, aka time machine for Linux.
It has been a while since I looked at it but does proxmox support HA replication using btrfs? From what I remember only zfs worked with those features.
I don’t know as I don’t use that feature
Its supposed to be called betterFS but Jim Salter keeps calling it butter FS. Doesn’t really inspire confidence. At least it’s gonna need… a better name
I don’t know who Jim is but I just call it butterfs
Jim Salter, the former mod of r/zfs ? Former Ars Technica ? Currently in the ’ 2.5 Admins’ podcast?
He’s the hot knife of butter FS.
Ok that still doesn’t ring a bell but he seems important to you so that’s good enough for me
