I recently started using Fedora with btrfs, which I think was the default on install. So far all I’ve noticed is that backups and restores are really fast and easy.

Are there any important things to be aware of, like speed, drive lifespan or energy efficiency?

  • glizzyguzzler@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    4 days ago

    It’s great for single drive, raid 0, and raid 1. Don’t use it for more raid, it is not acceptable for that (raid 10 obv ok). It still can lose data for raid 5/6 still.

    I’m not sure of the tools that Fedora includes to manage BTRFS but these scripts are great https://github.com/kdave/btrfsmaintenance you use them to scrub and balance. Balance is for redistributing blocks and scrub checks if bits have unexpectedly changed due to bit rot (hardware issue or cosmic ray). Scrub weekly for essential photos, important docs, and the like. Monthly for everything else. Balance monthly, or on demand if free drive space is tight and you want a bit more bits.

    RAID 1 will give you bit rot detection with scrub and self-recover said bit rot detection (assuming both drives don’t mystically have the same bit flip, which is very unlikely). Single drive will just detect.

    BTRFS snapshot then send/receive is excellent for a quick backup.

    Remember that a BTRFS snapshot will keep all files in the snapshot, even if you delete them off the live drive. Delete 500 GB of stuff, but the space didn’t reduce? Probably a snapshot is remembering that 500 GB. Delete the snapshot and your space is back.

    You can make sub volumes inside a BTRFS volume, which are basically folders but you can snapshot just them. Useful for scrubbing your essential docs folder more often than everything else, or snapshotting more often too.

    Lastly, you can disable copy-on-write (cow) for volumes. Reduces their safety but increases write speed, good for caches and I’ve read VM drive images need it for performance.

    Overall, great. Built-in and no need to muck with ZFS’s extra install steps, but you get the benefits ZFS has (as long as you’re ok to be limited to RAID 1)

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      Can’t make a claim for Fedora, but I know on OpenSUSE the maintenance,Scrub etc is already built In as cron/scripts. There’s no need to run additional scripts.

      • glizzyguzzler@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        4 days ago

        I was hoping the distros would just do the scrub/balance work for you - makes it no effort then! Good to know OpenSUSE does it for ya. Searching it looks like Fedora doesn’t have anything built in sadly, but the posts are +1 yr old so maaaybe they’ve done something.

        • Omega@discuss.online
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          4 days ago

          openSuSE expects you to be on btrfs + xfs for root and home, so it’s quite well integrated, and if you learn the admin software you don’t even need to memorise any cli

          • Ephera@lemmy.ml
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            4 days ago

            openSUSE is now one big btrfs partition. They dropped the separate xfs for the home partition maybe two years ago or so. It makes it less likely to run into a situation where the snapshots fill up the root partition (which is really ugly to recover from, because users will try to uninstall packages, which doesn’t help, since the files are still contained in a previous snapshot)…