[GLLUG] BTRFS and snapshots?

[Mike Brodbelt]

On 24/04/14 20:18, Benjamin Donnachie wrote:
> Does anyone on this list have any practical experience with BTRFS and in
> particular snapshots?

> However, all the talk about BTRFS being unstable makes me a little nervous.
>   Which leads me to ask, does anyone on the list have any practical
> experience with BTRFS?  Is it ready for prime time?  Will snapshots achieve
> what I want or should I return to revision?

Snapshots will do what you want. Whether Btsfs is suitably stable to 
trust your data to is a different question. The last time I used it was 
a couple of years or more ago, and my conclusion was that it was too 
rough and ready for me to risk production data on. I haven't looked at 
it more recently - it seems to be heading in the right direction though.

A filesystem is one of those pieces of code that really needs to work, 
and be bulletproof. IMHO, that only comes from years of real world use 
and bugfixing. Personally, today, I'd use ZFS instead - that has almost 
decade of more of real deployment, and is battle tested. With a 16Tb 
array, features liek the checksumming and protection from silent 
corruption become really valuable. The ZFS on Linux project is 
apparently pretty solid, or you could use FreeBSD.

Mike