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Forum Discussion
How much safer your data is when using BTRFS over Ext4?
I have read just about every published ReadyNAS review, as well as relevant Netgear materials, including this forum. I have prety good understanding of file systems, NAS concepts, RAID, etc. Yet I am ...
As far as I know BTRFS is safe, it is used as the default filesystem on some linux distributions.
That said all the distributions do not use it and most of them use ext4 by default including the leading ones, RedHat and Debian. Ext4 is just an evolution of already existing EXT formats, so it already earned the trust. BTRFS is a newcomer and it may take years for them to finally get the trust ZFS has today (not sure they will ever come close to EXT, except if BTRFS blows it by 50% on every existing benchmark or add more killer features).
The filesystem itself is still under development and many people would say that that status alone makes it unsafe. Now, Netgear folks tend to check their products before updating them and BTRFS guys seem to know what they are doing. So you have to ask yourself, do I trust Netgear (and BTRFS team) to do this checking for me, or do I prefer to use ZFS or some kind of LVM+ext4 combination.
So if you want my opinion, I never experienced problems and I don't think I will see some. If you want an IT professional opinion, unless a product is final, it shouldn't be used for production. The question here is more about trust than anything else. BTRFS doesn't crash every 5 minutes, doesn't lose data and have no memory leak (or at least not big enough to fill my 512Mb memory in 6 weeks). I don't think that anyone has your answer except maybe BTRFS guys, exactly because it actually comes down to trust, you never know what the next update will get you.
But that's also valid for microsoft that pulls back its patch tuesday a little too often nowadays...
That said all the distributions do not use it and most of them use ext4 by default including the leading ones, RedHat and Debian. Ext4 is just an evolution of already existing EXT formats, so it already earned the trust. BTRFS is a newcomer and it may take years for them to finally get the trust ZFS has today (not sure they will ever come close to EXT, except if BTRFS blows it by 50% on every existing benchmark or add more killer features).
The filesystem itself is still under development and many people would say that that status alone makes it unsafe. Now, Netgear folks tend to check their products before updating them and BTRFS guys seem to know what they are doing. So you have to ask yourself, do I trust Netgear (and BTRFS team) to do this checking for me, or do I prefer to use ZFS or some kind of LVM+ext4 combination.
So if you want my opinion, I never experienced problems and I don't think I will see some. If you want an IT professional opinion, unless a product is final, it shouldn't be used for production. The question here is more about trust than anything else. BTRFS doesn't crash every 5 minutes, doesn't lose data and have no memory leak (or at least not big enough to fill my 512Mb memory in 6 weeks). I don't think that anyone has your answer except maybe BTRFS guys, exactly because it actually comes down to trust, you never know what the next update will get you.
But that's also valid for microsoft that pulls back its patch tuesday a little too often nowadays...
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