How stable is BTRFS in Ubuntu? [closed]

I see entries describing BTRFS on Ubuntu 12.04 has some concerns due mostly to the maturity of the BTRFS product. Now that we have 13.10 available, is the BTRFS file system reliable?

Solution 1:

BTRFS is and will be for the time being in development. This is being shown in the BTRFS FAQ page:

Is btrfs stable?

• Short answer: Maybe.
• Long answer: Nobody is going to magically stick a label on the btrfs code and say "yes, this is now stable and bug-free". Different people have different concepts of stability: a home user who wants to keep their ripped CDs on it will have a different requirement for stability than a large financial institution running their trading system on it. If you are concerned about stability in commercial production use, you should test btrfs on a testbed system under production workloads to see if it will do what you want of it. In any case, you should join the mailing list (and hang out in IRC) and read through problem reports and follow them to their conclusion to give yourself a good idea of the types of issues that come up, and the degree to which they can be dealt with. Whatever you do, we recommend keeping good, tested, off-system (and off-site) backups.
• Pragmatic answer: (2012-12-19) Many of the developers and testers run btrfs as their primary filesystem for day-to-day usage, or with various forms of "real" data. With reliable hardware and up-to-date kernels, we see very few unrecoverable problems showing up. As always, keep backups, test them, and be prepared to use them.

This also applies to Ubuntu implementation of BTRFS.

Solution 2:

It is not stable enough for a server in production yet. From my own experience, the file system gets corrupted at times and this goes as far as the system restarting!

I had to revert back to ext4 after having 4 1TB SAS drives running on it for two weeks.

Update: It seems my corruption problems stem from a hardware problem, since similar errors appear if I run ext4.

Update: It's pretty stable since kernel 3.17. I've had many unscheduled shutdowns at a client site and the system recovers properly without any corruption.