Btrfs is default on OpenSUSE, has worked great for me for 7 years. No issues.

As a home user I’d recommend btrfs. It has main line kernel support and is way easier to get operational than zfs. I’d you don’t need the more advance raid types of zfs or deduplication, btrfs can do everything you want. Also btrfs is a lot more resource friendly. Zfs, especially with deduplication, takes a ton of RAM.

After 4 years on btrfs I haven’t had a single issue, I never think about it really. Granted, I have a very basic setup. Snapper snapshots have saved me a couple of times, that aspect of it is really useful.

My experiences:

ZFS: never even tried because it’s not integrated (license).

Btrfs: iirc I’ve tried it three times. Several years ago now. On at least two of those tries, after maybe a month or some of daily driving, suddenly the fs goes totally unresponsive and because it’s the entire system, could only reboot. FS is corrupted and won’t recover. There is no fsck. There is no recovery. Total data loss. Start again from last backup. Haven’t seen that since reiserfs around 2000. Found lots of posts with similar error message. Took btrfs off the list of things I’ll be using in production.

I like both from a distance, but still use ext*. Never had total data loss that wasn’t a completely electrically dead drive with any version I’ve used since 1995.

@unhinge I run a simple 48TiB zpool, and I found it easier to set up than many suggest and trivial to work with. I don’t do anything funky with it though, outside of some playing with snapshots and send/receive when I first built it.

I think I recall reading about some nuance around using LUKS vs ZFS’s own encryption back then. Might be worth having a read around comparing them for your use case.

I did my first BTRFS setup over the weekend. I followed the Arch wiki to set up what I thought was RAID 1 only to find out nearly a TB of copying later that it was splitting the data between the drives, not mirroring them (only the metadata was in R1.) One command later and I’d converted the filesystem to true RAID 1. I feel like any other system would require a total redo of the entire FS, but BTRFS did it flawlessly.

I’m still confused, however, as it seems RAID 1 only works with two drives from what I’ve read. Is that true? Why?

At some, long ago, the Ubuntu installer was offering to use zfs for the boot and root partitions. That sounded like a good idea and worked great for a long time, automatic snapshots, options to restore state at boot etc.

Until my generous boot partition started to run out if space with all the snapshots (which were setup automatically and no obvious way to configure) OK no big deal, write a bash script that finds the old snapshots and delete them manually whenever boot is full again.

Then one day recently my laptop wouldn’t boot anymore, Grub could no longer read the zfs on boot. Managed to boot with USB installation image, read zsf and chroot. Tried alot of things but in the end killed zfs and replace with ext4. Then made it boot again.

Apparently I’m not the only one with this issue.

I haven’t used them professionally but I’ve been using ZFS on my home router (OPNsense) and NAS (TrueNAS with RAID-Z2) for many years without problem. I’ve used Btrfs on laptops and desktops with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for the past year and a bit, also without problem. Btrfs snapshots have saved me a couple of times when I messed something up. Both seem like solid filesystems for everyday use.

Many many years ago I set up btrfs for the disks I write my backups to with a raid 1 config for them. Unfortunately one of those disks went bad and ended up corrupting the whole array. Makes me wonder if I set it up correctly or not.

Nowadays, I have the following disks in my system set up as btrfs:

• My backups disk because of compression.
• My OS drive because of Timeshift.
• My home folder because it feels safer. COW feels like it’ll handle power failures better, whilst there’s also checksumming so I can identify corrupted files.
• My SSD Steam library over two drives because life is short and I cba managing the two ssds independently.

It’s going fine, but it feels like I need to manually run a balance every one in a while when the disk fills up.

I also like btrfs-assistant for managing the devices.

Out of interest, since I’ve not used the “recommended partion setup” for any install for a while now, is ext4 still the default on most distros?

My only complaint with btrfs when I used to run it, is that kvm disk performance was abysmal on it. Otherwise I had no issues with the fs.

Linux does not support ZFS as well as operating systems like OpenBSD or OpenIndiana, but I do use it on my Ubuntu box for my backup array. It is not the best setup: RAID-Z over USB is not at all guaranteed to keep your data safe, but it was the most economical thing I was able to build myself, and it gets the job done well enough with regular scrubbing to give me piece of mind about at least having one other reliable copy of my data. And I can write files to it quickly, and take snapshots of the state of the filesystem if need be.

I used to use Btrfs on my laptop and it worked just fine, but I did have trouble once when I ran out of disk space. A Btrfs filesystem puts itself into read-only mode when that happens, and that makes it tough to delete files to free-up space. There is a magic incantation that can restore read-write functionality, but I never learned what it was, I just decided to stop using it because Btrfs is pretty clearly not for home PC use. Freezing the filesystem in read-only mode makes sense in a data-center scenario, but not for a home user who might want to try to erase data so one can keep using it normally. I might consider using Btrfs in place of ZFS on a file server, though ZFS does seem to provide more features and seems to be somewhat better tested and hardened.

There is also BCacheFS now as an alternative to Btrfs, but it is still fairly new, and not widely supported by default installations. I don’t know how stable it is or how well it compares to Btrfs, but I thought I would mention it.

There’s no reason you couldn’t; btrfs is pretty stable.

Edit: Going on five years of using btrfs on production servers (storing and processing data on a 24x7 basis).

I’ve been running ZFS in the form of FreeNAS/TrueNAS in production environments for the past 12 years or so. Started with around 5TB and currently have nearly 300TB across several servers. Mostly NFS nowadays, but have shared out SMB and iSCSI.

No data loss. Drives have been easy to replace and re-silver. We have had a couple instances where a failing ZIL or L2ARC has crashed a storage server and taken storage offline, but removing/replacing the log device got us up and running without data loss.

Btrfs I only have experience on home systems. It has reliably stored my data for several years now, but I’m about to put it to the test this weekend. I plan on adding 4x8TB disks to a 4TB mirror to turn it into a 20TB RAID10. Wish me luck!

Btrfs is good for small systems with 1-2 disks. ZFS is good for many disks and benefits heavily from ram. ZFS also has specially disks.

I have had great luck with my users’ home directories on ZFS. No issues in years. Used to have issues, and on those days I was glad root was on ext3.

I had issues with btrfs about 10 years ago. It is much better now.

Both experiences with Linux.

A different ZFS partition per user is really helpful for quota and migration.