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I've been burned by BTRFS too many times to trust it.

At work, our servers will get into a state where they just hang for a span from minutes to hours while BTRFS does "something". I'm not one of the admins though, so I don't know the exact details. I just know that this is a vendor-supported configuration and the vendor has been unable to tell us why this happens or offer any solution that makes it not happen. Our answer to this issue has been to rebuild servers with ext4 when things get bad. This has happened on multiple servers hosting different applications - the only commonality seems to be that write-heavy loads get it into this state. Servers that just have their OS on BTRFS but do all of their work on NFS volumes are fine.

At home, I once rebooted my OpenSuse Tumbleweed laptop and ended up with a BTRFS filesystem that couldn't be mounted RW. Fortunately I was able to mount it RO after booting off installation media and copy my data off, but I couldn't get the filesystem back into a state where it could be mounted RW. I ended up reinstalling. I never did figure out the root cause, but I suspect that some BTRFS-related process was running when I rebooted.

On the flip side, ZFS has never let me down in this way, but to be fair I've never subjected it to the same use-cases. Unfortunately, the inability to resize/reshape the filesystem is an issue for me. I believe that it's being worked on, but I don't think that work is production-ready yet.




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