Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production

An anonymous reader writes "Btrfs is the next-gen filesystem for Linux, likely to replace ext3 and ext4 in coming years. Btrfs offers many compelling new features and development proceeds apace, but many users still aren't sure whether it's 'ready enough' to entrust their data to. Anchor, a webhosting company, reports on trying it out, with mixed feelings. Their opinion: worth a look-in for most systems, but too risky for frontline production servers. The writeup includes a few nasty caveats that will bite you on serious deployments."

Comments

Read their website

[Anonymous Coward]

It says "experimental." They appreciate you helping them test their file system out. I appreciate it too, so please do. But remember that you are testing an experimental filesystem. When it eats your data, make sure you report it and have backups.

Re:Read their website

[pipatron]

Every file system is/should be labled "experimental" in a way. The long answer from the btrfs FAQ is pretty good, and makes some sense:

Long answer: Nobody is going to magically stick a label on the btrfs code and say "yes, this is now stable and bug-free". Different people have different concepts of stability: a home user who wants to keep their ripped CDs on it will have a different requirement for stability than a large financial institution running their trading system on it. If you are concerned about stability in commercial production use, you should test btrfs on a testbed system under production workloads to see if it will do what you want of it. In any case, you should join the mailing list (and hang out in IRC) and read through problem reports and follow them to their conclusion to give yourself a good idea of the types of issues that come up, and the degree to which they can be dealt with. Whatever you do, we recommend keeping good, tested, off-system (and off-site) backups.

Re:Read their website

[Zero__Kelvin]

Did your cousin also find out what exact hardware and exact code was used? If my friend has had no problems with filesystem $FS and then I use it with different hardware and code implementing it, then there is still a significant chance that I will have trouble that he did not. Filesystems all work perfectly, because they are conceptual. It is the implementation that may or may not be stable.

ZFS

[0100010001010011]

Meanwhile ZFS announced that it was ready for production last month.

http://zfsonlinux.org/

Re:Happy with XFS

[MBGMorden]

Your happy with XFS because your machine has never lost power or crashed. If either of those things happened with the older versions of XFS it was nearly a 100% guarantee you would lose data. Now i'm told its more reliable.

I don't know about being more reliable. I use XFS on my RAID array (mdadm) at home. I'm running the latest version of Linux Mint (Nadia), and if I ever lose poser and don't unmount that file system cleanly it looses all recent changes to the drive (and "recent" sometimes stretches to hours ago). The drive mounts fine and nothing appears corrupted (so I guess its not completely data loss), but any files changes (edits, additions, or deletions) to the file system are simply gone.

Its gotten to the point where if I've just put a lot of stuff on the drive I unmount it and then remount it just to make sure everything gets flushed to disk. If I ever get a chance to rebuild that array it most certainly will be using something different.