Stick with ext3/ext4

Luks+btrfs with Arch as daily driver for 3 years now, mostly coding and browsing. Not a single problem so far :D

Been using Btrfs for a year, I once had an issue that my filesystem was read only, I went to the Btrfs reddit and after some troubleshooting it turned out that my ssd was dying, I couldn’t believe it at first because my SMART report was perfectly clean and the SSD was only 2 years old, then a few hours later SMART began reporting thousands of dead sectors.

The bloody thing was better than smart at detecting a dying ssd lol.

At some, long ago, the Ubuntu installer was offering to use zfs for the boot and root partitions. That sounded like a good idea and worked great for a long time, automatic snapshots, options to restore state at boot etc.

Until my generous boot partition started to run out if space with all the snapshots (which were setup automatically and no obvious way to configure) OK no big deal, write a bash script that finds the old snapshots and delete them manually whenever boot is full again.

Then one day recently my laptop wouldn’t boot anymore, Grub could no longer read the zfs on boot. Managed to boot with USB installation image, read zsf and chroot. Tried alot of things but in the end killed zfs and replace with ext4. Then made it boot again.

Apparently I’m not the only one with this issue.

Linux does not support ZFS as well as operating systems like OpenBSD or OpenIndiana, but I do use it on my Ubuntu box for my backup array. It is not the best setup: RAID-Z over USB is not at all guaranteed to keep your data safe, but it was the most economical thing I was able to build myself, and it gets the job done well enough with regular scrubbing to give me piece of mind about at least having one other reliable copy of my data. And I can write files to it quickly, and take snapshots of the state of the filesystem if need be.

I used to use Btrfs on my laptop and it worked just fine, but I did have trouble once when I ran out of disk space. A Btrfs filesystem puts itself into read-only mode when that happens, and that makes it tough to delete files to free-up space. There is a magic incantation that can restore read-write functionality, but I never learned what it was, I just decided to stop using it because Btrfs is pretty clearly not for home PC use. Freezing the filesystem in read-only mode makes sense in a data-center scenario, but not for a home user who might want to try to erase data so one can keep using it normally. I might consider using Btrfs in place of ZFS on a file server, though ZFS does seem to provide more features and seems to be somewhat better tested and hardened.

There is also BCacheFS now as an alternative to Btrfs, but it is still fairly new, and not widely supported by default installations. I don’t know how stable it is or how well it compares to Btrfs, but I thought I would mention it.

I did my first BTRFS setup over the weekend. I followed the Arch wiki to set up what I thought was RAID 1 only to find out nearly a TB of copying later that it was splitting the data between the drives, not mirroring them (only the metadata was in R1.) One command later and I’d converted the filesystem to true RAID 1. I feel like any other system would require a total redo of the entire FS, but BTRFS did it flawlessly.

I’m still confused, however, as it seems RAID 1 only works with two drives from what I’ve read. Is that true? Why?

After 4 years on btrfs I haven’t had a single issue, I never think about it really. Granted, I have a very basic setup. Snapper snapshots have saved me a couple of times, that aspect of it is really useful.

Btrfs is good for small systems with 1-2 disks. ZFS is good for many disks and benefits heavily from ram. ZFS also has specially disks.

I haven’t used them professionally but I’ve been using ZFS on my home router (OPNsense) and NAS (TrueNAS with RAID-Z2) for many years without problem. I’ve used Btrfs on laptops and desktops with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for the past year and a bit, also without problem. Btrfs snapshots have saved me a couple of times when I messed something up. Both seem like solid filesystems for everyday use.

My experience with btrfs is “oh shit I forgot to set up subvolumes”. Other than that, it just works. No issues whatsoever.

@unhinge I run a simple 48TiB zpool, and I found it easier to set up than many suggest and trivial to work with. I don’t do anything funky with it though, outside of some playing with snapshots and send/receive when I first built it.

I think I recall reading about some nuance around using LUKS vs ZFS’s own encryption back then. Might be worth having a read around comparing them for your use case.

I use ZFS to do RAID on a NAS because I was too lazy to look up how to do a proper RAID setup. Works pretty well. Have had to replace two hard drives, and rebuilding seems to work just fine.

I use BTRFS on my desktop (programming stuff mostly, but also gaming) and on the SD cards of my Steam Deck for the compression. I think ZFS would’ve suited me as well, but I didn’t want to deal with out of tree kernel modules so BTRFS made more sense.

Timeshift works pretty well in my experience, especially when integrated with the distro package manager to automatically make snapshots before installing/upgrading packages.

LUKS is my go-to solution, but I still need to figure out how to upgrade the LUKS PKDF without breaking anything. I use Grub with full disk encryption (and intend to keep using it) but Grub lacks several modern key derivation functions. If you’re planning on using an alternative (i.e. unencrypted /boot, or systemd-boot) you’ll probably be better off making sure you use modern crypto. I don’t think there’s any real proof that LUKS can be broken in its normal setup, but there were rumours some French guy got arrested and had his LUKS encryption fail on him, so you never know.

As a home user I’d recommend btrfs. It has main line kernel support and is way easier to get operational than zfs. I’d you don’t need the more advance raid types of zfs or deduplication, btrfs can do everything you want. Also btrfs is a lot more resource friendly. Zfs, especially with deduplication, takes a ton of RAM.

Can’t vouch for ZFS, but btrfs is great!

You can mount root, log, and home on different subvolumes, they’d practically be on different partitions while still sharing the size limit.

I would also take system snapshots while the system is still running with one command. No need to exclude the home or log directories, nor the pseudo fs (e.g. proc, sys, tmp, dev).

My experiences:

ZFS: never even tried because it’s not integrated (license).

Btrfs: iirc I’ve tried it three times. Several years ago now. On at least two of those tries, after maybe a month or some of daily driving, suddenly the fs goes totally unresponsive and because it’s the entire system, could only reboot. FS is corrupted and won’t recover. There is no fsck. There is no recovery. Total data loss. Start again from last backup. Haven’t seen that since reiserfs around 2000. Found lots of posts with similar error message. Took btrfs off the list of things I’ll be using in production.

I like both from a distance, but still use ext*. Never had total data loss that wasn’t a completely electrically dead drive with any version I’ve used since 1995.