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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

So far I have been happy with btrfs instead.

I'm a long term ZoL user that's been looking over the fence at btrfs for a long time. I've been tempted to switch since I only use ZFS mirrors (RAID 5 instability isn't a deal killer). If you don't mind me asking, how long have you been using it and have you had any stability issues?

I lost a bit of data circa 2013 on a BTRFS RAID5 as a result of a power loss. I rebuilt the array as RAID1 and it's been fine ever since, despite initially using only ST3000DM001 drives (most of which are now dead). I've added and removed drives more times than I can recall (some dead or dying, some just too small or slow to keep in service), migrated the array piecemeal over to an assortment of SSDs of varying sizes, recovered from mistakes like ejecting the wrong drive while the filesystem was mounted, and switched the metadata to RAID1c3, all with reasonably low downtime and no data loss. There have definitely been times I would have appreciated the space efficiency of a reliable RAID5/6 setup, but on the other hand I've made heavy use of features that ZFS doesn't have and probably never will.

Yeah seems good. I will say, WinBtrfs is unfortunately garbage, but you can just set up a simple Linux VM as an SMB server in Hyper-V with dynamic memory, and for me it uses about 700MB of RAM. Works great.

FYI, WSL now supports mounting physical disks. So if you're running a setup like that, you can take advantage of a VM managed for you, along with not having to run Samba because files are made available in explorer (via 9P).

I was able to get it working (with a few setup issues) with a RAID 1 mirror: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6711#issuecomment-10...

(Forgive linking in the middle of a Github issue. Everything ended up working with the latest updates and being an administrator.)

I tried it twice and got completely hosed drives twice somehow.

Have had zero hosed drives with ZFS. Although with ZFS not being supported in the kernel, it's fairly hard to do a ZFS-on-root setup unless you're using Ubuntu.

YMMV.

Ditto; I used BTRFS on OpenSUSE - y'know, the big distro that's all-in on BTRFS and that's been using it for forever, the one place where I'd expect it to work - and it ate the whole root filesystem twice. The first time I tried to recover (fsck? I forget), the second time I didn't even try and just reinstalled. In hindsight, I'm not sure why I reinstalled on BTRFS again, but it hasn't managed a third time at least:) (Now that I've written that, it will of course break)

btrfs is the default for fedora workstation 35 and seems to work well for normal use cases. However it failed miserably when I tried to download the monero blockhain, either through raw import or incremental p2p sync. The fix was simple - set the database directory to nocow, recreate the db from a backup and all was well. But btrfs has that sharp edge users need to worry about in case they do have a large, regularly written file (say, like a database) hosted on the filesystem. XFS never had such an issue.

Every time I've used btrfs I've gotten bitten. The tooling in general is just not up to snuff to ZFS's vertical integration approach.

How is performance nowadays if you have a couple thousand snapshots? And can I assume there's no admin overhead, like manually balancing things?

Why would one need thousands of snapshots, in practice?

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