What to choose for speed and stability:
XFS, EXT4 or BTRFS file system?
Real experience and real advantages/disadvantages.
Convenient in use or not?
I have been using EXT4 for already many years. Timeshift works perfectly and saves me if needed. They say, BTRFS is still not so reliable and accumulates errors. What does practical use tell us?
XFS is only really useful if you’re talking about massive scales of data and bandwidth - we’re talking filesizes in the order of 10s of GBs and upwards into the TB and PB needing to be moved as quickly as possible.
Personally I would disregard that one straight away and focus your investigations on the latter two 
THANKS a lot!!!
ext4 if you need a filesystem, it’s fast.
btrfs has a lot of nice features, really great for stabilty, I use snapshots to quickly restore the system to a working state from grub if an update borks something. But you can achieve something similar with ext4 + timeshift.
I would advise newbies to use ext4, it’s easier to understand in my opinion.
I’d also say use EXT4, but I don’t believe it is easier, as I’ve used Timeshift with both EXT4 and BTRFS.
Having to chroot to do a restore in case of a non-booting system vs selecting a snapshot during boot? No-brainer. BTRFS is easier and way faster (just remembered how fast it is).
However, the reason I’d say use EXT4 is that nowadays more users have SSDs, and from my experience with BTRFS on an SSD, it corrupted some of my files. I’ve converted the SSD to EXT4 since then, but now it is only used for files I can easily redownload from the cloud because I don’t trust that the drive is still safe for use.
To confirm, it is a Samsung T7 external SSD. Maybe it was an isolated issue, but I’m just giving some info on the drive in case that matters to someone, or maybe it was the cause rather than BTRFS.
PS: To select a snapshot during boot with BTRFS, you’d also need to use Grub.
I use EOS without GRUB right now. And successfully used Timeshift images several times during setup and tuning. ) EXT4 to be on the safe side.
It is an old technology, but reliable. )
This is a fallacy. Btrfs is extremely reliable and stable. Use it with btrfs-assistant, snapper-support, btrfsmaintenance and grub-btrfs with grub bootloader. It’s better than timeshift in my opinion.
I’ve allways used EXT4 and had never any problems and it’s fast I don’t like BTRFS Maby the new BcacheFS can be something in the future but for now EXT4 is best and most stable.
Who is They? 
You know ‘They’ the amorphous userbase in Cloudland 
While I do not know if it is any faster or more stable I have been using XFS on my systems since Red Hat made it there default many years ago.I tried BTRFS and the only issue I had was I tried to add a new ssd and didn’t know what I was doing so I crashed the whole system.I have EOS installed in virtualbox as guests on 2 different desktops using ext4 and have had no file system issues.I guess it really comes down to what we get used to as they all seem to have there good and bad points.
It depends on your use case and your expectations. Btrfs is far more prone to unrecoverable failure than ext4 or xfs.
When something unexpected happens like hard powering off a machine, a battery dying or some type of hardware/software issue, all filesystems have the potential to get some corruption. However, with btrfs, it leads to a non-functional filesystem a greater percentage of the time. Btrfs improved this a few years ago by adding a second copy of the metadata by default but we still regularly see people having issues with btrfs volumes becoming unrecoverably broken.
On the other hand, when looking at use cases like data center applications, the reliability is phenomenal.
Here are a few questions you could ask yourself in making the decision between ext4 and btrfs.
Ultimately, it will be up to you. There are lots of real cases of btrfs data loss. Far more than with most other filesystems. However, you should consider the circumstances under which that data loss occurred and compare that to your own situation.
In the end it is equally false to say “Btrfs is totally reliable. I have never had a problem.” as it is to say “Btrfs is unstable and should be avoided.”.
Thank you so much for the fundamentally comprehensive and useful reply!
Btrfs is great for NAS devices.
Ext4 for client-side imho, - it’s more than capable.
I’ve been using btrfs on my laptop for about 10 years or so. Simply, because I enjoy its features like subvolumes, snapshots aso.
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