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I've seen a lot of information on btrfs lately. I have been considering ext4 for my next filesystem, but am tempted by btrfs instead. How widely used is btrfs? What are the pro's and con's?

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Pro: According to this interview, it's perfectly acceptable to refer to the filesystem as ButterFS. – Kyle Smith Jun 30 '11 at 18:05
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5 Answers

up vote 8 down vote

Absolutely not. And here's why:

From the Btrfs Wiki:

Note that Btrfs does not yet have a fsck tool that can fix errors. While Btrfs is stable on a stable machine, it is currently possible to corrupt a filesystem irrecoverably if your machine crashes or loses power on disks that don't handle flush requests correctly.

When it's pushed out as the default root filesystem in Fedora Core (which is pretty bleeding edge) I think I'll start experimenting with Btrfs on testing machines. When it starts to stabilize sometime after, I think I'll begin to use it on new non-mission critical production machines.

I never like to be in a hurry to lose my data.

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up vote 6 down vote

Personally, I would consider it production ready when (and if) the likes of Canonical and Red Hat implement it in their supported products. I'm sure it'll all work fine, most of the time, but I would say that for putting it in production it is a bit too early still.

Update: Assuming people will come here more often now that Oracle released the UEK R2 with btrfs support (20120315): no, the fact that Oracle now supports it, does not make it thoroughly tested enough for an enterprise environment. The fact that there still isn't a publicly available fsck tool and it still hasn't had sturdy testing in the likes of OpenSuSE, Fedora and all doesn't help either. Stay away for now.

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Compared to RedHat & Canonical, Oracle is also in a unique position because they employ the primary Btrfs developers. If a customer has a support issue, it can be escalated internally to the Btrfs engineers. At least, that's the theory. Not sure how well that will work in reality. In addition, Oracle may be releasing Btrfs prematurely so that they can get more real world experience with Btrfs, and apply pressure on the developers to get things done. – Stefan Lasiewski Mar 15 at 15:58
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Sure they have Chris Mason working there, but it is still a relatively untested filesystem on which I would not put any production data. I'd like to give it a spin and test it out a bit, but not without an open and working fsck tool. – wzzrd Mar 16 at 8:26
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up vote 5 down vote

In short no.

• The only RAID support is currently 0,1,10.
• No file system repair is available (yet)

Checkout this podcast with one of the developers...very cool things are coming soon!
http://streaming.oracle.com/ebn/podcasts/media/10491325_Btrfs_071311.mp3

I am planning on installing on a home VM without important data for testing, but that's as comfortable as I can be with it's current state.

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up vote 2 down vote

if you have backups, and can tolerate a few hours downtime, got for it. I'm planning to use it on my next workstations. Not servers yet, because most of my volumes are several terabytes, so restoring from backup takes too long time.

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up vote 1 down vote

personally, its ready when it supports RAID-5.

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You can sit btrfs above a RAID 5 device, the RAID 5 support listed in the wiki is about moving the multi-device support from the block layer to the file system. – Steve-o Aug 29 '11 at 3:18
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yea, but that's what i'd really want in it as a technology. – Sirex Sep 2 '11 at 11:15
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