Linux

Transparent compression, snapshots, copy-on-write, deduplication, and data checksumming (and healing via read or scrub) are the main things you might notice as an end-user. BTRFS is mostly on par or slightly slower than other simpler filesystems for speed (can be faster on HDDs due to compression), so if you're using it you probably want to be taking advantage of the features it offers, not because it's going to be faster.

As a (semi) power user I also use btrfs subvolumes to create "partitions" (single disk system, @root, @home, @docker), allows for making snapshots only for system or user data, etc.

All around, I love btrfs and I am never going back to journaling fs like ext4

Copy on Write and auto-compression seem like they will free up a bit of space.

That benefit is more theoretical, than practical. The majority of content you have on your drive will be content that is already heavily compressed at the file format level (e.g. images, movies, music) and where additional compression has no effect. So don't expect any big savings out of the box, you get about 5-15% saving on a regular install.

The real benefit are in the additional functionality it provides, e.g. you can use copy-on-write to make backups of large games before trying to mod them, backups that you might have previously avoided due to 100GB copies taking so long, with BTRFS it is done in a second.

As for BTRFS snapshots you seem to have the wrong idea what they are for. With them you can create backups of your whole filesystem within a second, so you can have full backup in case something goes wrong. With the snapper daemon you can easily automate that make new snapshots every hour and expire them when no longer needed. That's a really useful thing to have and with BTRFS it's basically free.

Another big advantage is the ease of partitioning, or the lack of a need for it, with BTRFS subvolumes all your volumes can share the same free space, while still being addressable as separate file systems, e.g. you can have subvolumes for / and /home, without having to guestimate how much space you might need in the future. Can also be abused to install multiple distributions on the same filesystem.

Also checksums, BTRFS will tell you when your data goes bad.

If you don't think you want snapshotting then dont worry too much about it and use whatever fs you like. if you want a nice btrfs experience try tumbleweed or leap, it is already fully integrated with system and grub , and maintenance with cleanup etc. cobbling together btrfs on your own is fine too but if you miss sometging and mess things up it is usually user error not btrfs error. .

For me, snapshots are the best part of BTRFS because you can easily roll back bad updates without doing a fresh install. It might not be worth reinstalling for, but there's no reason not to on your next install.

I use BTRFS simply because I run a rolling distro of Linux. For the average user, I don't think it is quite as necessary but the snapshots are nice. Of course, you could use timeshift to make snapshots as well.

I love btrfs. Mostly, because I had a couple of instances of data loss with ext4, and because it's far more user friendly than xfs. Btrfs has sane defaults, and when you do want to use the tooling, there's a lot of good documentation, and it's mostly straightforward.

That said, unless you have some reason to be mucking around with the fs or want to play with snapshots or such, then I'd say just use your OS defaults.

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For me, BTRFS is worth it for the transparent compression and file integrity checks alone.

I am not sure what Fedora does for virtual machines via boxes (like transparently disabling COW), but one caveat with BTRFS is that you have to be aware that COW is a problem for usage patterns of virtual machines on their images. Just for this one example alone BTRFS is probably not a good fit for the average user.

Another thing which I just learned very recently, is to mount BTRFS volumes with the noatime option significantly speeds up a lot of workloads on my machine (machine has a decent SSD). Again, using the noatime option might create some problems in corner cases, so one should be aware what one is doing.

Yes, snapshots nice to have and compression reduces the disk usage for the operating system and software quite a bit.

I've had a major issue with btrfs and nvme. Not sure if you have a laptop or a desktop, but it works fine on my desktop and shit on the laptop. Snapshots still didn't save my system the other day when the system broke in the middle of a kernel upgrade. I even had snapshots in grub. I still had to reinstall to be able to access the system. I was also told that xfs is much better. Haven't tried it yet. I personally don't care for btrfs, and I'm using the tried and true ext4 and it's been serving me very well. I have the root and home partitions separated in case shit goes haywire.

It you have a functioning dual boot don't worry about it. Next install it's worth looking in into and pretty easy to setup. It has trim support for ssds and is way easier to resize on a live system than lvm with another filesystem

I'm mostly in it for the RAID1 with checksums. If a bit gets flipped, it'll get flipped right back from the other copy next time the automatic scrub happens. Normal RAID1 can't do this because, without checksums, it doesn't know which copy is good.

If you've written shell scripts, I don't think you're an average user. 😋

I use ZFS, not BTRFS, but both have snapshots, and if you're someone who likes to tinker with their system like me, it lets you do so without worrying that it will break.

Yes. I dual-boot and need everything to be accessible from Windows so I gave Windows 400 GiB while Linux only 75 GiB. Without compression I would be out of disk space. I think I hold about 95-100 GiB of data in 70 GiB. Snapshots are to revert broken updates, not to setup fresh installations. If you use a rolling release distro, they become invaluable. You can boot into snapshots if an update goes sideways.

Yes, a few examples of advantages here: https://lemmy.world/post/3197228

Yes and no. It is good and I did one restore of some files that worked fine, but in my case it was noticeably affecting my boot up times, and I reverted to ext4 (boot ups were fast again to less than one minute). For some reason, BTRFS was resulting in quick login, but about 18 mins before my actual desktop was responsive after login. I spend many days trying to troubleshoot that. Maybe you won't have this problem. I had my SSD system drive on ext4 with Timeshift backups, and my /home partition on BTRFS.

So I'm back on my ext4 doing a daily automated backup to a second drive with rsync (LuckyBackup app). I think there are further kernel improvements coming to BTRFS later in this year. But I'll probably only retry it again end of 2023 or in2024. So if you decide to move, just benchmark your boot times, so you can judge if it affects them badly or not.

That said, BTRFS has some great features, lost no data for me, and I think has a great future.

I use btrfs only for secondary and external drives, while keeping the main system on ext4.

Copy on write is likely to introduce significant performance decreases in cases where large or medium size files have a couple bytes changed. It’s usually recommended to turn CoW off on those files; I found it to be more hassle than it’s worth for a root filesystem. It is still a reasonable file system for file storage that looks more like archival - files land there and seldomly or never change. If you don’t have a specific need in mind though, I wouldn’t bother - in my opinion, it’s not great as a general purpose filesystem.