Managed to find a way to easily and reliably mount a BTRFS volume on my mac. So now I can use BTRFS on the backup systems and still have the ability to plug-in a chonky disk directly to my laptop.
https://github.com/nohajc/anylinuxfs
AnyLinuxFS was the solution with the least headaches. Easy to install under HomeBrew. Needed a few tweaks on the mount command to side-step some permissions issues unique to BTRFS...
sudo anylinuxfs /dev/disk5s1 ~/24TB --nfs-export-opts rw,no_subtree_check,all_squash,anonuid=0,anongid=0,insecure -n noowners
This little tool essentially builds a tiny Virtual Machine that talks to the disk directly then shares as an NFS mount to your Mac. And it's sooooooooo much easier than all the bollocks I tried with spinning up Ubuntu in Docker or UTM or whatever.
Can recommend.
Found someone suggesting that it could be libav. But I've got gstreamer-plugins-libav, which is pulling in libavcodec62.
And if I re-enable Packman and install their bad/ugly-codecs then it STILL doesn't work. I'm missing something and I can't see what.
Balls and bugger it. Time for a rollback. Thank goodness for Snapper! #openSUSE #Tumbleweed #Btrfs
And one person was suggesting #BTRFS, not sure how good of an option using it on a bunch of unequally sized drives is considering that RAID56 is still considered unstable.
However if I wanted to store multiple full copies that probably could work though.