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by dobsonj 1826 days ago
> BTRFS has proven remarkably stable for a while now. A decade ago that wasn't quite as absolutely bulletproof, but today the situation is much different.

When I did a fresh install of Fedora 33 on my primary workstation 3 months ago, I had exactly the same rationale for sticking with the default BTRFS selection. "I'm sure it has come quite a long way since I last tried it, I would like to have some of those features, I know there are some large production installations now, and the fact that it's the default in Fedora is a sign of confidence from the community."

After 2 months of use, I ended up with a corrupt filesystem in the middle of my work day and could not find any way to recover from it other than to do a full reinstall and restore my files from a backup. This was on a single NVMe drive in a system running a few small VM's, a browser, a chat client, and a few terminals. Thankfully I only lost a day's worth of work, but that's the last time I install BTRFS on any of my personal systems.

> [...] it feels a bit odd that BTRFS is such a persistent target of slander & assault.

My experience is obviously anecdotal (as are all individual experiences), so I won't be surprised if you dismiss my comment like you did nullwarp's comment. But "slander & assault" just seems like a weird way to dismiss all critics of BTRFS at once, as if everyone is out to get BTRFS. Filesystems have a thankless job. Do it right, and most users will never even think about it. But lose a user's data once, and you've likely lost that user forever.

> A number of big names use BTRFS, including Facebook. I have yet to see any hyperscalers interested in ZFS.

ZFS is excellent for large arrays of spinning disks, but if you're using a bunch of fast SSD's, performance really sucks. There is a lot of lock contention contributing to that which isn't noticeable on slower devices. I can't speak to FB's environment, but if they're managing a large number of SSD's like most hyperscalers, then ZFS would probably get ruled out based on performance comparisons.