Is it safe to use Btrfs?

Solution 1:

Novell Suse SLES11 people think so, because this enterprise distribution skips write support for ext4 in favour of btrfs. I've tested btrfs a couple of weeks ago (with a 3.0 kernel) and I managed get 2 snapshots that could not be removed, within 20 minutes experimenting.

I don't think you should trust your most valuable assets (photo's, music tracks, development files ...) to btrfs unless you are absolutely sure you have proper backups. If you don't need btrfs for its features, don't use it for other purposes than testing.

Solution 2:

The filesystem btrfs is no longer a technology preview in the kernel but as eager as I am to use it, I'm not switching just now. Here is why I would also advise not to do it (note that this answer might be out-dated shortly) by order of importance

• the file system check utility is too recent and not enough mature.
• btrfs is still in active development with new features added often, that's not what I called stable.

Solution 3:

It is absolutely NOT safe to use Btrfs. Just performed my 5th re-install of Ubuntu 12 within a week. Btrfs is unstable as an alpha and crashes after each little update. Having /boot as btrfs results in not finding kernel files. Having / as btrfs results in major damage to the root system.

Don't ever use the autorecovery and compression functions as they actually make things worse. Compression causes lot of file errors and autorecovery is STILL not working.

Lots of error reports on Launchpad and developers, as usually, are dismissing most of them as not relevant.