I wouldn’t put my mission-critical file server on BTRFS.
Oh, but I and a lot of people do and it is way more reliable than ext* filesystems ever were. Maybe ZFS or XFS is more your style then? Ext4 is very, very prone to total failure and complete data loss at the slightest hardware issue. I’m not saying you should rely on any filesystem ever, backups are important and should be there, the thing it that recovering from backups takes time and the amount of recovery that ext forced me into over the years isn’t just acceptable.
I used to associate btrfs with the word unreliable for years based on what I’ve read here and there, while ext4 appears to be rock solid. Pointing to sources for this is not easy though. Here’s a start.
ext4 (fourth extended file system) is an open source disk filesystem and most recent version of the extended series
of filesystems. It is the primary file system in use by many Linux systems rendering it to be arguably the most stable
and well tested file system supported in Linux.
The “Caveats” section for BTRFS is trash, it is all about a ENOSPC issue that requires you to low level mess with the thing or run the fs for years over constant writes without any kind maintenance (with automatic defragmentation explicitly disabled). Frankly I can point from the top of my head real issues they aren’t speaking about: RAID56 (everything?), RAID10 (improve reading performance with more parallelization).
If we take subvolumes, snapshots, deduplication, CoW, checksums and compression in consideration then there’s no reason to ever use ext4 as it is just… archaic. Synology is pushing for BRTFS at home and business so they must have analytics backing that as well.
Oh, but I and a lot of people do and it is way more reliable than ext* filesystems ever were. Maybe ZFS or XFS is more your style then? Ext4 is very, very prone to total failure and complete data loss at the slightest hardware issue. I’m not saying you should rely on any filesystem ever, backups are important and should be there, the thing it that recovering from backups takes time and the amount of recovery that ext forced me into over the years isn’t just acceptable.
I used to associate btrfs with the word unreliable for years based on what I’ve read here and there, while ext4 appears to be rock solid. Pointing to sources for this is not easy though. Here’s a start.
See Features and Caveats here for Btrfs : https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Btrfs#Features
For Ext4 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Ext4
The “Caveats” section for BTRFS is trash, it is all about a ENOSPC issue that requires you to low level mess with the thing or run the fs for years over constant writes without any kind maintenance (with automatic defragmentation explicitly disabled). Frankly I can point from the top of my head real issues they aren’t speaking about: RAID56 (everything?), RAID10 (improve reading performance with more parallelization).
If we take subvolumes, snapshots, deduplication, CoW, checksums and compression in consideration then there’s no reason to ever use ext4 as it is just… archaic. Synology is pushing for BRTFS at home and business so they must have analytics backing that as well.