When trying a "btrfs rescue super-recover ..." from the rescue system, I get: Superblock bytenr is larger than device size Usage or syntax errors Then I see a segfault of btrfs use process. Likewise "chunk-recover" produces: read superblock error recover prepare error Fail to recover the chunk tree. Eventually I tries a "zero-log" on the device which succeeded. Unfortunately even after that I get the same message as in comment 4, and any attempt for "filesystem balance" just gives "No space left on device". Next thing I tried was "filesystem defragment" which succeeded, but didn't free up any space for balance. As I had some space left on the VG, I resized the 16GB lvol to 18 GB, and then I could rebalance! To summarize: BTRFS and it tools have to go back to the drawing board for a re-design!