Interesting read. My understanding is that BTRFS has had long standing issues with it’s parity raid configurations (I.e. Raid5/6). Recently, kernel version 6.2 seems to have added more fixes. I’ll stick to the “wait and see” approach for the time being, as Raid1 is sufficient for my home server.
Other than the Raid5/6 issue, I don’t know of any other issues with BTRFS losing data. If there are some, I’d love to know.
I had my first case of corruption a few days ago. It was super minor and only for one file. I don’t really know how it happened, but it was mid-bittorrent download. My best guess was that it might have been from a bad shutdown but I simply deleted the file and it was fine.
I am really waiting for RAID 5 support, but I don’t think that’s going to get fixed until they get that new stripe tree feature in.
Reminds me of a time I ended up getting some corruption in some cache file for firefox. It was after I did a number of forced power offs. I’m not sure if I should blame such corruption on the filesysten.
I don’t really know how it happened
Better hope it was cosmic radiation and not an early indicator of failing hardware.
I think the upcoming on-disk format changes are going to fix most of the RAID5/6 issues.
I keep being tempted by the flexibility of the mirror-layouts of btrfs and bcachefs, I have so many old disks that are smaller than my main disks but still a useful amount of space. But ZFS is just so mature and reliable, and the newer contenders seem to still fight with such serious bugs… it’s very hard to convince myself to jump over.
The ZFS ecosystem also has some really mature snapshot-based backup system that both snapshot the local disk and can do send/recv to copy to backup disks locally or remotely… and clean up old snapshots. So I’d be signing up to replace that as well.
