BRTFS or EXT4

greetings community.

BRTFS vs EXT4 which one?

Is BRTFS stable and worth to give it try?

I wouldn’t. Others would. Should you? Your decision. Not ours.

Depends on your use case, your technical knowledge, and if you actually need the features btrfs provides.

3 Likes

You can read about them here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ext4

I’m with @otherbarry - I use ext4

3 Likes

Please read this article that tackles the differences between the two filesystems, it’s a good informative read: https://linoxide.com/btrfs-vs-ext4/

Reading that should give you a better perspective on if you need btrfs or ext4 for your system. I can’t tell you what you should use, but I can tell you that I use ext4, because it’s stable, well tested, it just works, and it’s the default. Btrfs only makes a difference if you plan on using the features that btrfs offers, otherwise there isn’t much of a point.

3 Likes

i ask coz colecting information from more experienced and knowledged community. I wanna have finally stable system for long keep term. My final OS i think be EOS so make collections of suggestions from you thanks.

I appreciate all of your times.

Those who use Btrfs say its pretty stable for daily use.

I chose to stick with ext4 because thats what I have been using all along. Btrfs features look nifty, but I haven’t faced any situation on my machines where I would actually utilize those.

2 Likes

btrfs trades a small amount of stability and performance for a bunch of advanced features and functionality.

If those features are things you are interested in and add value to your system, you should use btrfs.

If not, ext4 is a better choice. It really is that simple.

8 Likes

Use EOS XFCE or Cinnamon on ext4. You’ll have a wonderfully stable system.

4 Likes

But not terribly accurate…

In the first paragraph:

The most commonly used are Ext4, Btrfs, XFS, and ZFS which is the most recent file system released back in 2018.

Ahh…zfs is older than both ext4 and btrfs being released in 2006. On that list, only xfs is older.

3 Likes

I’d have to say that depends a lot on your perspective as to ‘age’.
AFAIK, 3 of them vie for dates with 2001 being of importance - XFS, ZFS, and ext3 (almost to ext4). btrfs was from 2007, and wasn’t declared stable until 2014 (I think). Let’s just say that the timelines weren’t well-researched!

Personally, I think ext4 is a good choice (especially if you can find the variant that doesn’t journal on nvme) - and zfs, while harder to use, is what btrfs wants to grow up to be :grin: Currently running f2fs, ext4 and zfs on the majority of systems - and btrfs on Garuda because it’s embedded so deeply…

2 Likes

For my secondary backup (two 1 TB USB drives), I choose BTRFS for its deduplication, compression and RAID 0 capabilities. It’s pretty good for squeezing the bytes out of smaller drives, but also depends on the types of files stored. So far, I never encountered problems or corruption. It just works™.

For everything else, I do stick with the well-known ext4, especially if you need something like file recovery, as they’d presumably be more mature tools for the task being a more popular filesystem.


The BTRFS wiki has a table with known stability issues: I’d say the only reason NOT to go with BRTFS if you wanted a RAID 5/6 set up, which is unstable at the moment:

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status

As long there’s a backup of your data, have an endeavour into other filesystems and see which one suits your file storage needs best. :+1:

1 Like

It is BTRFS not BRTFS coming from B-tree file system.

Yes. As @lah7 pointed out, stay away from RAID5/6 and you will be fine. It is the default in enterprise-level distros like Fedora/Red Hat and SUSE Linux/openSUSE. I never had a problem myself but that is just me.
If you don’t have time to research and just want to try out BTRFS, try openSUSE Tumbleweed and see it in action. openSUSE automatically sets up BTRFS with snapshotting, snapshot booting and recovery. Just create a BTRFS partition for root during installation. This is how I got into BTRFS and decided to switch to BTRFS from ext4.
If you have time to research, then do it :smile: You can convert an ext4 filesystem to BTRFS and then set it up yourself. Make a backup though.

Post edited according to @dalto s reply below

2 Likes

There are some legitimate reliability issues with btrfs. Since we get very new kernels on Arch, sometimes very new kernels have breaking btrfs issues. Potentially of the unrecoverable variety.

Additionally, recoverability is an issue. Most of the common issues people have with btrfs are not caused by bugs but by something going wrong such as a forced shutdown or unexpected power loss. This can cause issues with any file system but the chance of those issues being unrecoverable is higher on btrfs. I have had this happen to me twice where I lost btrfs volumes.

Actually, red hat dropped support for btrfs completely. You can’t even optionally do a btrfs install.

2 Likes

I should have known that before posting. Thanks for the information.

2 Likes

Well, it shouldn’t be too much of an issue if you have a good backup of all important data. Still, it does sound a bit scary. I mean, you are fairly experienced and knowledgeable about btrfs, and it happened to you… twice.

I prefer ext4 for the simple reason I’m well familiar with it, and I do not really have the burning desire for fancy features of btrfs (though they do sound nice). I know that if I switch to btrfs right now, there are going to be teething issues like data loss, until I get to know it well, and I just can’t be bothered.

Maybe I’m just lazy, and switching to btrfs would make me happier, but I just don’t feel motivated to change anything when I’m happy with the status quo. ext4 works, it’s simple and familiar.

3 Likes

I agree. To be clear, I use btrfs in many places because, for me, the benefits outweigh the risks. Also, I have a tested backup strategy and I can sustain data loss in the event of the worst case scenario.

3 Likes

That’s always important. All data storage fails eventually, if nothing else, it’s a hardware failure. It is not a matter of if, but when. If you don’t want to lose data, back it up, at least twice, and make sure the backup is good (i.e. can be restored).

Most people, including me, learn this lesson the hard way.

3 Likes

How so? The drive wasn’t mountable at all anymore?

Main reason I switched to btrfs was snapshots - managed with snapper, backed up to an external drive (also with btrfs). I also use compression, but IMHO that’s not enough of a reason to dump ext4.

1 Like

Yes, couldn’t be mounted and none of the tools were able to fix it. When the wrong pieces of metadata gets corrupt you are just completely done.

Again, I am not anti-btrfs, quite the opposite in fact. That being said, I also think people should go in knowing the risks.

3 Likes