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by jeffdavis 4528 days ago
I thought btrfs was going nowhere for a while because it seemed way behind zfs for a long time.

But now it looks like it's catching up, and has some nice userspace tools, and some features that I don't even think zfs has (like the option to do overwrite-in-place, but you give up checksums/compression).

The user tools seem worse than zfs, but it does look like btrfs will be a leading filesystem soon.

1 comments

I wouldn't say soon. Btrfs needs much more robust userspace tools. At the moment, the tools tell you nothing, and recovery is basically impossible. I have lost data several times now. While I had backups since I was using btrfs, I didn't expect to lose data the way that I did. The drive filled up with metadata, and since it didn't have anywhere to rebalance the metadata it couldn't move it, and even if I deleted files it wouldn't make a difference. It happened to me on two occasions. The interesting thing is that btrfs filesystem df showed I only had 80gb total, with a 120gb drive. Decided to go back to xfs for that drive, and I use zfs for my raidz2 array.