do you use Btrfs instead of Ext4 ? ..if so, what reason(s) ?
#asknostr
Discussion
If I need the features that Btrfs offers I’m generally going for ZFS instead. That could be my BSD roots coming thru, but I don’t yet trust Btrfs.
Hm, is ZFS already part of initrd and supported by grub for root fs? The last time I checked on ubuntu, this was not straight forward compared to btrfs. Also I need encryption/luks.
I haven’t used it for root fs, I’ve only done it for large data drives. Not sure if it’s supported or not.
I’m mostly interested in the snapshots, compression and RAID like mirroring/parity. I’m not sure if it supports encryption.
Yes, I do. Mainly because of snapshots. Snapper + GRUB integration lets me roll back snapshots after failed updates. I can also easily back up by simply sending snapshot deltas to my NAS. OpenZFS is even better, but it is harder to integrate all of this.
Other alternatives are “immutable” distros, but I honestly cannot stand them, and I am too lazy to use NixOS as a daily driver.
i use Timeshift if i need to roll back when using Ext4, and it's worked fine in the rare instances i've needed it
I didn’t know that Timeshift could work with Ext4... Interesting. Thanks for the hint.
That said, I’m happy with the trade-offs of a CoW filesystem at home. Instantaneous snapshots are a great feature overall. They let me treat my bare-metal deployment almost like a VM. While I did have to customise Snapper a bit to avoid an explosion of snapshots (which can slow down the filesystem), the performance hit isn’t too noticeable; at least on dev laptops with NVMe drives.
timeshift is more efficient with btrfs, but it works with anything