I'm curious if anyone here has worked with BTRFS, and what their opinion of it is. The newest ReadyNAS units ship with it now, but it seems odd to me to send devices into production using a "experimental, still in heavy development and marked unstable" filesystem.

Debating if I'm even going to consider a new ReadyNAS now or just switch vendors.

I'm not using it -- a lot of standard tools just don't work on it, so I have my doubts about the ability to recover from failures just yet.

FWIW Oracle uses it in production.

I'm not "the fs guy" but our devices will probably use it - the features it offers are just too compelling.

Unlikely to be in the first product though.

I did not know that! Surprising too, considering they also have ZFS in their portfolio. But I guess that's only good for their non-Linux *nix systems.

It is now a year on since the last message on this thread, and I'm considering giving BTRFS a go. Is anyone here using it, and is it to be trusted yet?

I never did try and convert my existing ReadyNAS to it (there are unofficial ways to do this, but it involves a full factory reset).

RHEL 7 is switching from ext4 to XFS as the default. BTRFS support is advanced from the experimental preview in RHEL 6 but didn't make the cut to be the default. Being that they are a bit more conservative, this tells me that it's not quite ready for primetime still on something highly mission critical, but may be fine in general use elsewhere.

I continue to use ext4 for all of our general-purpose filesystems, and xfs only for the video collections (relatively few files, each very, VERY large in size).

I did accidently format a backup drive with XFS recently, and had issues where the XFS code would just "hang" mysteriously after a certain number of inodes (dunno, perhaps a million or so) were in-use on that drive.

Needless to say, that's not Good Behaviour, so the drive quickly got reformatted to ext4, and now works fine with even more data on it.

I have been storing my music and video collection on BTRFS for something like 2 years now, and so far no issues (apart frome temporary reorganisation load stuff). Knock on wood...

Thanks guys, I think I have (finally) decided!

I'm going to buy a decent external backup drive using ext4 for documents, photos and music, and then I'm going to cross all my fingers and toes and give BTRFS a spin. If (when?!) it eats all my data I'd probably lose a ton of video that I've already seen. Annoying, but not the end of the world. The whole exercise is probably a good push for me to create a decent/better backup system too.

Wish me luck!

Interesting Arstechnica article on ZFS and BTRFS here.

Well, I'm zero-impressed by their misunderstanding of "bit rot". Drives don't return "bad data" == they return "bad sector" errors, and only after applying a few hundred bits of ECC to the data in question.

[EDIT] Okay, I had to stop reading mid second page. Just too painful reading stuff written by someone who clearly has no idea what they are talking about.[/EDIT]