mcc"Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel"
✧✦Catherine✦✧@mcc been that way for decades now
@whitequark I have a new hard drive I intend to use primarily for backup and I am currently considering BTRFS or ZFS for the Linux part instead of ext4 (because I hear they can do some thing of storing extra error-checking data to protect against physical disk corruption). In your view, if I intend to use mainline Debian indefinitely, will BTRFS, ZFS, both, or neither give me the least pain getting things working?
@whitequark A few people are commenting on BTRFS reliability problems which is weird because I thought the whole point was to be "the more reliable fs". Debian's wiki links to this bewildering compatibility table that looks like a bunch of stuff I don't care about (the only features I care about are reliability, and some of zfs's auto-backup stuff sounded compelling) but the weird "mostly ok" line around defragmentation/autodefragmentation worries me a little https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/Status.html
you're all idiots@mcc @whitequark I've worn out* I think three sets of HGST disks on btrfs over the years and have had little problems.
* from old age in SMART data
@mcc @whitequark No data loss except once I ended up having a directory that would crash the os if accessed. I had been migrating file systems with DD onto new disks since the first usable versions of btrfs. Eventually on the next set of disks (maybe 8 years ago) I did a clean mkfs and never had any problems since.
@mcc So it's stable enough but it does have some issues with database files which don't do well with the btrfs data model, leading to massive fragmentation caused by the random writes.
This is not an issue if you're copying files whole like for a backup.
This is not an issue if you're copying files whole like for a backup.
@mcc for a single backup disk you would probably be better off with xfs or ext4 simply because there's no need for the btrfs special features.
If it ever comes to data recovery then these two will be better known, and easier on the recovery process.
If it ever comes to data recovery then these two will be better known, and easier on the recovery process.
@mcc except if you're backing up a btrfs to btrfs. It then becomes possible to make snapshots on the master and then stream those to the backup, recreating snapshots there.