this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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I'm not quite sure why people are still worried about the stability of btrfs when it has been rock solid for years. Synology has been using it for quite a while now in their NAS systems, they surely wouldn't if it'd mean a lot of customers were at risk of losing their data.
There are valid reasons not to be using btrfs (although I'd argue most ordinary use cases don't have a valid reason), but stability certainly isn't one of them, independent of the distribution used (unless it's ancient).
Wait til your table with all the checksums gets messed up on an “older” btrfs install. Happened to me on a VM because I didn’t know copy-on-write should be disabled for large frequently partially updated files. It also slowed that VMs IO down a lot.
Like most file systems, BTRFS is great if you know the edge cases. I recently moved to ZFS on my new work system, which has been a great change in terms of in-line snapshots and the like.
If EXT4 meets your needs, that’s awesome. If you understand how to use a different FS well or are willing to learn (and risk), I would also encourage other options as well.
Because of widespread fearmongering, itself caused by the filesystem taking too long to become stable and garnering a bad reputation as a result which it has never shaken off.
Note my research of BTRFS is almost a year old now. And there was still a few headlines making round of problems with BTRFS in some cases. A controlled NAS system is not the same as random user configuration of a random desktop user. And as said in my comment, I was not sure if it would be stable for my installation (when I did my research) and did not claim it to be unstable. On the other side, I know for a fact that EXT4 is stable and I did not research more or experiment to find out which one is better for me.
Current state of BTRFS: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Status.html (note when I did my research, Linux was at Kernel v6.4, therefore BTRFS was in a worse situation than today)