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Comment by selfhoster11 | Hacker News Reader

I lost data with Btrfs, whereas ext4 has been rock solid for many years. No thanks.

If you really care about your data you should be using a file system with checksums but in my experience btrfs is prone to fail if the hardware is not reliable.

About two years ago I tried it with second hand hdds thinking it would be good for checking the reliability of the drives. After writing some data in one of them and a reboot it failed to mount it again, total data loss while it would have been at most a partial data loss if using ext4 thanks to fsck. This happened 2-3 times as I was testing and didn't care about the data, on ext4 no issues at all. Still using btrfs as the root fs on a new ssd, the snapshots are really useful for backups, no problems in two years. But for reliability I would try zfs instead.

I personally switched to btrfs years ago due to it being (anecdotally) more resilient to power outages and forced reboots. With ext4 it would sometimes result in corruption but btrfs so far has been rock solid. Not a big deal of course but 0 corruption per year is proportionally infinitely better than 1.

I experience somewhat frequent power outages and my ext4 computers (3) have not had corruption afaicr.

i had many friends who were very vocal about btrfs. most of them lost their data at one point, with btrfs, due to data corruption.

I've only heard of BTRFS corrupting data in RAID configurations, but for a single disk laptop setup it seems perfect to me. Automatic snapshotting has already saved my ass several times.

If we're trading anecdotes, I managed to lose 2 root filesystems to BTRFS, on a laptop with a single drive, on OpenSUSE (which has been using BTRFS by default for ages, i.e. the one place I expected it to be the most stable). I think it was some problem triggered by filling the filesystem, because that system had too small of a root FS and snapshots piled up too fast, but I don't know for sure what happened, only that I couldn't find a way to recover it short of wiping root and reinstalling (thankfully, I had a separate home so that was actually okay). And to answer the obvious question, I don't know that it wasn't a hardware problem, but the home FS on the same machine, also on BTRFS, never gave me any problems, and honestly if the filesystem's reaction to a hardware error is to hose the whole filesystem that's still a hard pass from me.

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