Related to this.I'd like to take advantage of an OS switch to upgrade to BTRFS.BTRFS claims to offer a lot (data-loss resiliency, self-healing if RAID, checksumming of metadata and data, compression, snapshots). But it's slow when used with fsync-intensive programs such as dpkg (I know eatmydata and the crappy apt-btrfs-snapshot programs) and I won't setup a RAID :p.EXT4 allow metadata check-summing only and doesn't compress data.In 6 years, I had to reinstall my OS twice because of HDD corruption (after flight trips). The first making the laptop unbootable, the second bunch of corruptions was identified thanks to a corrupted film and then md5sum check of the OS binaries. (SMART tells me the disk is sane). The lappy currently behave quite strangely. I don't know if the hardware or the software is to blame but I suspect the hardware (it all began right after a flight, once again). Would you advise to switch to BTRFS for a laptop because of data compression and check-summing or should I stick with EXT4? (I don't care about which is best relative to whatever variable but I have almost no experience with BTRFS and would like some feedback)EDIT:Let's be clearer:BTRFS is still flagged as experimental, I know, but SUSE says it shouldn't anymore. So does Oracle (I know who Oracle is). And a bunch of distributions already propose BTRFS for installation and most of them are planning to switch to it in the next few months.Two facts:Backups of corrupted data are worthless. I don't understand why I seem to be the only one to bother. Isn't that common sense? In the meanwhile:Stop telling me I should do backups: I already do.Stop implying backups are just enough to keep my data safe except if you are willing to give me TBs of free space to do years worth of backups.A corrupted file =/=> Linux complaining. So:Don't assume your system/data are sane just because the OS is booting.I hope you understand that I prefer (meta)data checksumming to an over-engineered and bloated piece of software that would inconveniently do half as a good job as BTRFS to check the data integrity.Is that more clear now that I am not asking for which FS is better? The question is, given that I regularly do backups, is BTRFS still too experimental to be used for its data-integrity checking functions or should I stick to EXT4?
Should a laptop user switch from ext4 to btrfs?
linux;filesystems;ext4;btrfs
I agree with vonbrand, btrfs is not yet to the maturity level of ext* or XFS or JFS to name a few. I would not use it on a laptop with precious data unless I have a reliable backup that can be done also on the go.Btrfs can detect corruptions but it won't do anything more than reporting the detection unless you have an available uncorrupted copy of the same data, which means you either need RAID or duplication of data on the volume.That said, I am considering using it (using RAID-1) for one machine, but I also do have Crashplan running on this machine!For a long time, I have been using JFS on my laptop. One reason was the lower CPU usage compare to XFS or ext3 when doing file operations. I have never verified if it saved power consumption as well, but that was my assumption. I found JFS pretty stable and safe, never lost data while using it.