1 yr. ago • 81%

Btrfs is a great filesystem for proxmox in raid 1. Stop telling people not to use it

Btrfs gets a bad rap sometimes but I have been using it for years and it works very well. It is able to take failing hardware and power outages and still has good performance.

30 comments

For those without knowledge: Alternatives to BTRFS are what? EXT4 or NTFS?

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- Mostly ZFS, XFS and ext4
  
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- Correct, btrfs is a filesystem format.
  
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  What are the alternatives to it? NTFS? EXT4? ExFAT? FAT32??
  
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Yes BTRFS is really good and solid. Usually survives hardware failure much better than the EXT* crap. And sub volumes and snapshots, damn finally a modern filesystem.

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Agreed, I switched over from OpenZFS to btrfs and while it does lack some more advanced features, using btrfs for raid1 disk pools has been a very solid and hassle free experience.

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To be honest, I don't see a benefit for btrfs (or zfs). I prefer plain ext4 (no LVM). It's simpler and faster. I have no need for snapshots. Proxmox handles my vms and my working machines are just a collection of dot files... But that's just me. It's good that there are choices.

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- Ext4 is slower than btrfs
  
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  It's been a while since I looked at benchmarks (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems). It could be these days.
  
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I've used Proxmox in the past w it, worked okie. One crazy hypervisor, ton of features. I mostly stick w VMware, it just works. My uptime is measured in years.

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- Well I'll never get a uptime like they in proxmox cause I update.
  
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- You can do the same thing with proxmox.
  
  The benefit of proxmox is that it is libre and uses Linux components.
  
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It has been a while since I looked at it but does proxmox support HA replication using btrfs? From what I remember only zfs worked with those features.

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- I don't know as I don't use that feature
  
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My anecdotal experience with btrfs is that it constantly broke in raid 1, no problems with any other filesystems on the exact same hardware and setup. YMMV

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- How long ago was that? Modern btrfs is pretty stable.
  
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  Last year, unraid, identical SSDs. I changed so many sata and power cables, so many settings.
  
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- I love it for single drives, but for RAID, ZFS all the way.
  
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  ZFS also supports single drives, is there a reason to use btrfs instead?
  
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Its supposed to be called betterFS but Jim Salter keeps calling it butter FS. Doesn't really inspire confidence. At least it's gonna need.. a better name

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- I don't know who Jim is but I just call it butterfs
  
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  Jim Salter, the former mod of r/zfs ? Former Ars Technica ? Currently in the ' 2.5 Admins' podcast?
  
  He's the hot knife of butter FS.
  
  1

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