you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD
you can use snapper + btrfs and the end result is like `bectl`. However it not as simple/integrated as ZFS Boot environments on FreeBSD
On openSUSE Tumbleweed, it is. Each Upgrade creates two snapshots, one before, one after, and if anything goes wrong, I can boot into a snapshot where the world was still in order.
I have a higher opinion of ZFS than I do of btrfs, but FWIW snapper+btrfs has worked well for me on openSUSE Tumbleweed for ten years now, too.
The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the reports I have read.
Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT.
The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.
btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID.
But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However:
- It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora)
- Gets a lot of testing
- Sees a lot of bug fixes
- Has a lot of features
I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file system and Linux code quality tends to be good in popular subsystems I would hesitate to say its code quality is worse than ZFS in any way.
btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks.
https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems
In real world scenarios, where file based backups fail, one needs to add at least lvm.
And only than those benchmarks would be more interesting to me.