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by Aardwolf 1366 days ago
Do you happen to know if there's a linux filesystem that has bitrot protection, but doesn't need snapshots?

- ZFS is not in the Linux kernel so I don't want to use it for a daily work machine

- btrfs works fine but its tools to undelete/recover files when something did go wrong are pretty bad

- XFS looks ancient, not sure how good it is

- ext4 is also pretty aged by now, but is what I use now after my attempt at btrfs. It doesn't have any bitrot protection though

Is there anything else viable today? The above are basically the same choices as I also had 10 years ago

2 comments

I would use PAR2 for this. It's not the most integrated approach to dealing with bitrot like ZFS, but it feels much more composable - very Unix-like in a sense. PAR2 has one job (protect against bitrot with sidecar parity files) and does it well, and so does ext4 (store files without losing everything).

I certainly wouldn't use btrfs. It ate my data at one point, and misbehaves without any provocation. I don't trust it, and am quite vocal about that whenever it's mentioned.

Zfs will never make it into mainline unless someone rewrites it from a blackbox specification.

The zfs license is incompatible with gpl.

That being said zfs is awesome, it is simple to use, about as bulletproof you can get.