6 ms·

i have been using btrfs in production for years now and it has never failed me, and i am doing hundreds of snapshots and send/receiving, i've reconfigured raids

by isnull 8y ago

i have been using btrfs in production for years now and it has never failed me, and i am doing hundreds of snapshots and send/receiving, i've reconfigured raids on the fly and went from 6 disk raid 10 of mixed size to raid 10 of same size. we have in some cases had many power failures with no data loss. We also have some set up using md raid and some using hardware raid... when i hear people dogging btrfs it just speaks to their inexperience imo. that said i know it's not perfect, but what is?

arianvanp 8y ago
Are you using btrfs native RAID support? The docs say it's really unstable so I was scared to use it
- isnull 8y ago
  I run single with hardware or md raid, or btrfs raid 1 or 10. Usually the latter. Raid5 and 6 are unstable in the "avoid at all costs" kind of way. This may be of use if youd like to know more: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status
Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed with BTRFS on a laptop. This is nothing special - a 512GB SSD, no RAID, about 350GB of data and a bunch of snapshots. It was basically the out of the box configuration plus some snapper config to regularly snapshot /home. One day I shut it down and it wouldn’t boot - the BTRFS filesystem had gotten itself into a state where it would mount ok read-only but hang the system when mounting read/write. My best guess is that I shut it down (meaning a normal shutdown through the GUI) while it was running its weekly rebalance in the background. I’ve since recovered the data and rebuilt the machine, but it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve had a filesystem (any filesystem) fail me.
- krylon 8y ago
  Huh. I had that same problem on two machines running Tumbleweed a couple of months ago. In both cases, the only working approach I found was to wipe the root partition and install from scratch. /home was in a separate partition, so it was not a tragedy, but annoying nevertheless. This has never happened to me before, unless the underlying hardware was about to retire.
  - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
    I wasn't so lucky since I had everything as one big BTRFS filesystem. I did recover it by booting the installer in recovery mode, mounting the fs read-only, and doing a backup. Then I blew away the partition table and reinstalled. I also learned a lesson about backups, mainly that I should have them.
  - pnutjam 8y ago
    Tumbleweed is a rolling edge release. I get wonky desktops and other problems all the time when I update.
    - krylon 8y ago
      That is true. But I have used Gentoo, another rolling release distro, before that (way before that, actually), and I never had such a problem with Gentoo, even on the unstable branch. From what I hear Arch users tell about their distro of choice, Arch does not give them this kind of headache, either. And last but not least, the reason I took the plunge and went for Tumbleweed was that the project uses extensive automatic testing to ensure they do not break anything. Do not get me wrong, I still use Tumbleweed on both machines and do not see that changing for the foreseeable future. I know what I signed up for. ;-)

by isnull 8y ago

arianvanp 8y ago

Are you using btrfs native RAID support? The docs say it's really unstable so I was scared to use it

isnull 8y ago
I run single with hardware or md raid, or btrfs raid 1 or 10. Usually the latter. Raid5 and 6 are unstable in the "avoid at all costs" kind of way. This may be of use if youd like to know more: https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status

Mister_Snuggles 8y ago

I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed with BTRFS on a laptop. This is nothing special - a 512GB SSD, no RAID, about 350GB of data and a bunch of snapshots. It was basically the out of the box configuration plus some snapper config to regularly snapshot /home. One day I shut it down and it wouldn’t boot - the BTRFS filesystem had gotten itself into a state where it would mount ok read-only but hang the system when mounting read/write. My best guess is that I shut it down (meaning a normal shutdown through the GUI) while it was running its weekly rebalance in the background. I’ve since recovered the data and rebuilt the machine, but it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve had a filesystem (any filesystem) fail me.

krylon 8y ago
Huh. I had that same problem on two machines running Tumbleweed a couple of months ago. In both cases, the only working approach I found was to wipe the root partition and install from scratch. /home was in a separate partition, so it was not a tragedy, but annoying nevertheless. This has never happened to me before, unless the underlying hardware was about to retire.
- Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
  I wasn't so lucky since I had everything as one big BTRFS filesystem. I did recover it by booting the installer in recovery mode, mounting the fs read-only, and doing a backup. Then I blew away the partition table and reinstalled. I also learned a lesson about backups, mainly that I should have them.
- pnutjam 8y ago
  Tumbleweed is a rolling edge release. I get wonky desktops and other problems all the time when I update.
  - krylon 8y ago
    That is true. But I have used Gentoo, another rolling release distro, before that (way before that, actually), and I never had such a problem with Gentoo, even on the unstable branch. From what I hear Arch users tell about their distro of choice, Arch does not give them this kind of headache, either. And last but not least, the reason I took the plunge and went for Tumbleweed was that the project uses extensive automatic testing to ensure they do not break anything. Do not get me wrong, I still use Tumbleweed on both machines and do not see that changing for the foreseeable future. I know what I signed up for. ;-)