Comment by sethhochberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sethhochberg | Hacker News Reader

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Depending on how you store this data (the number of physical disks involved) you may also want to explore ZFS. ZFS and BTRFS have pretty comparable features, but given how battle-hardened ZFS is, and its ever-increasing integration into the Linux ecosystem, I'm seeing less and less reason to prefer BTRFS.

Both do checksumming and regular scrubbing to help detect bitrot, but both need sufficient redundancy configured to actually be able to repair the corrupted data when it is detected.

There is exactly one distro that comes with ZFS, so it's a bit exaggeration to say it's well integrated with Linux, considering how much effort is applied by kernel developers to make it even harder to use ZFS. And this one distro that includes ZFS is just one lawsuit away from removing it again.

It's easy to use zfs on Debian and derivatives

  apt install dkms spl-dkms
  apt install zfs-dkms zfsutils-linux

I am testing OpenZFS with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS right now. OpenZFS seems pretty solid so far (I tried various scenarios of failure/corruption) and Ubuntu seems to actually care about ZFS support and its integration in Linux.

Ubuntu, Proxmox, Manjaro all have root on ZFS via the installer and there are others that I don't remember offhand.

That, this, is the most diplomatical way of saying 'just use ZFS' we've seen in a decayed. Mod parent up. BTRFS will never be a suck-zess. Use ext4 or ZFS for life.

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