On 2017-02-26 09:02, Dr.-Ing. Dieter Jurzitza wrote:
Hello nicholas, have you ever tried to fix a broken Brtfs? I do not think so because your email tells me so.
The errors vary, btrfsck is simply not working, you are stuck every other time with a file system that is said to be full though it isnt. And there is no way to fix, try to find some information how to fix broken Btrfs file systems, you'll almost always fail.
What partition size were you using? I recommend a minimum size of 100 GiB for "/", with /home separate.
If a root fs is broken, whom will you ask to fix anything if the tools available are simply disfunctional?
Well, ask here. :-) But you are right, the tools should work, automatically, and never make things worse.
Search for "ext4 problem" and search for "btrfs problem". The differences are striking in numbers. There is even a wikipedia article listing tons of problems and may-be-circumvents for btrfs - I do not find anything similar for ext4. Guess why. ext4 problems are usually hardware problems - or someone ran into the overfull - limits. ext4 is simply more forgiving than Btrfs.
Yes, ext4 is the safe choice, I agree.
You did not state why the change to Btrfs was done before ... nobody ever said that so far.
Well, btrfs has new and interesting features. The most important, it has snapshots. I have seen people with no experience install some updates that crash the system. Reboot, choose a previous snapshot, problem solved. In minutes. As compared to finding the offending updates, locate previous versions of the updates, install them if package manager was not broken in the disaster... It has compression. I have not tried it yet, but it is the only r/w Linux filesystem that has it. NTFS has it, since ages. ext4 has the hook, but has never been implemented. Same for XFS. Reiserfs has not it. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" (Minas Tirith))