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An unexpected setback (Patreon)

Published:
2021-11-18 02:26:05
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

The last week was far from the best time of my life.

Files

Bcache + Btrfs DIED with NO hardware fault!

I was unable to confirm that the underlying SSD or HDD drives were having any issues. I don't know why Bcache got corrupted all of a sudden, making my root Btrfs filesystem unbootable as well. I've had a 2-months old backup of the root partition (when I moved my Btrfs filesystem to Bcache). No project data was lost, I had that on an a separate drive, on another Btrfs filesystem. And also I do incremental backups of that ever day. If you want to learn why installing Arch Linux took me 3 days, here's a forum thread I've started when I got stuck: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=271206 Going forward I'll make better better backups to recover quickly from such failures.

Comments

Mitsch

Oh-no! I did a fresh install on my multi-media-machine, recently, and I already wondered if btrfs is a good joice (performance wise) for this kind of workload. But now it seems to me, btrfs is just not as stable as good old ext4. Read on phoronix, there is some tweaking going on reguarding kernel/btrfs - so I hope your filesystem crash has nothing to do with it. The raid-, timeshift- and compressing-features of btrfs are killer, but stability is certainly the one top-feature we users can't get around. So, I guess, I'm better off sticking with ext4 (or xfs) where data is important. Lesson 2: Timeshift can't keep you from taking backups. I also hope it's just time you have to spend and not so much data was lost! Anyway: Best wishes from me!

Andrey Pivovarov

Ahhhh... btrfs... I also trusted it for quite some time. But couple of years ago also experienced problems with my home server. Never use it since then, just the good old plain ext4.

Andrey Pivovarov

By the way, unfa, the working horse should be reliable. That's the first law, which I understood a long time ago. At first I also been experimenting with different Linux distros, until finally, 6-7 years ago, settled down to Debian stable on the "no more broken s***t!" principle. And do not regret ever since. I know a few people consider Debian stable a good choice for desktop, but in fact it is! It works flawlessly and never lets down at the least unexpected moment. For the latest app versions I use Flatpak, Appimages and packages from the official backports repo. Plus, if I really want something extra fresh, I simply compile it myself. But at least the very system is always rock stable.

unfa

Well, because part of my work is testing the newest software and I can't maintain two computers or two OSes, I have to balance that.

unfa

I've had a few "duh" moments with Btrfs, not sure if I didn't mess up myself. It also saved me a lot of time and pain in some instances, so it's difficult to say if it's worth the hassle. I'm staying with it for now. When Bcachefs becomes a viable alternative I'll start testing that (on non-crucial data, and keeping backups on another drive and FS).

unfa

It's difficult, I think Btrfs has some issues with recovering from what should be a simple problem. Overall I think it's good and many a company uses it for massive data storage. It definitely has some flaws (in the design and disk format, as pointed out by the Bcachefs creator), and it has performance bottlenecks when reaching extreme conditions like 1000s of snapshots or very low free disk space. But I think it's still a viable option. It just requires backups. Like everything else. Backup or suffer!