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tell me your experience using zfs/btrfs

cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/9319044

Hey,

I am planning to implement authenticated boot inspired from Pid Eins’ blog. I’ll be using pam mount for /home/user. I need to check integrity of all partitions.

I have been using luks+ext4 till now. I am hesistant hesitant to switch to zfs/btrfs, afraid I might fuck up. A while back I accidently purged ‘/’ trying out timeshift which was my fault.

Should I use zfs/btrfs for /home/user? As for root, I’m considering luks+(zfs/btrfs) to be restorable to blank state.

Ramin_HAL9001 ,

Linux does not support ZFS as well as operating systems like OpenBSD or OpenIndiana, but I do use it on my Ubuntu box for my backup array. It is not the best setup: RAID-Z over USB is not at all guaranteed to keep your data safe, but it was the most economical thing I was able to build myself, and it gets the job done well enough with regular scrubbing to give me piece of mind about at least having one other reliable copy of my data. And I can write files to it quickly, and take snapshots of the state of the filesystem if need be.

I used to use Btrfs on my laptop and it worked just fine, but I did have trouble once when I ran out of disk space. A Btrfs filesystem puts itself into read-only mode when that happens, and that makes it tough to delete files to free-up space. There is a magic incantation that can restore read-write functionality, but I never learned what it was, I just decided to stop using it because Btrfs is pretty clearly not for home PC use. Freezing the filesystem in read-only mode makes sense in a data-center scenario, but not for a home user who might want to try to erase data so one can keep using it normally. I might consider using Btrfs in place of ZFS on a file server, though ZFS does seem to provide more features and seems to be somewhat better tested and hardened.

There is also BCacheFS now as an alternative to Btrfs, but it is still fairly new, and not widely supported by default installations. I don’t know how stable it is or how well it compares to Btrfs, but I thought I would mention it.

BCsven ,

Btrfs is default on OpenSUSE, has worked great for me for 7 years. No issues.

Sureito ,

Same here, but for only 1 year on my main machine and 6 years on my laptop. I looove snapper. It saved my ass so many times

BCsven ,

Yes it is great. For me snapper rollback was an awesome onboarding experience to linux. Being eager to try things I read online for tweaks and general explorarion it brought me back to a working system after some custom kernel compiling gone awry, or deleting the wrong file etc.

sxan ,
@sxan@midwest.social avatar

I’ve been on btrfs for so many years, with nightly backups with restic, so I’ve been dragging my feet on snapper. Finally installed it a couple weeks ago, and while I opened the config, I don’t think I changed anything. It’s worked so well, and the Arch package was so well done, that I’d forgotten I had it installed until a few days later I noticed that it was taking snapshots every time before I installed something. It’s shockingly good, and I don’t understand why btrfs+snapper(+grub-btrfs) isn’t the default on installs now.

deliriousn0mad ,

After 4 years on btrfs I haven’t had a single issue, I never think about it really. Granted, I have a very basic setup. Snapper snapshots have saved me a couple of times, that aspect of it is really useful.

Penguincoder ,

As a home user I’d recommend btrfs. It has main line kernel support and is way easier to get operational than zfs. I’d you don’t need the more advance raid types of zfs or deduplication, btrfs can do everything you want. Also btrfs is a lot more resource friendly. Zfs, especially with deduplication, takes a ton of RAM.

pastermil ,

Can’t vouch for ZFS, but btrfs is great!

You can mount root, log, and home on different subvolumes, they’d practically be on different partitions while still sharing the size limit.

I would also take system snapshots while the system is still running with one command. No need to exclude the home or log directories, nor the pseudo fs (e.g. proc, sys, tmp, dev).

rhys ,
@rhys@rhys.wtf avatar

@unhinge I run a simple 48TiB zpool, and I found it easier to set up than many suggest and trivial to work with. I don't do anything funky with it though, outside of some playing with snapshots and send/receive when I first built it.

I think I recall reading about some nuance around using LUKS vs ZFS's own encryption back then. Might be worth having a read around comparing them for your use case.

unhinge OP ,

afaik openzfs provides authenticated encryption while luks integrity is marked experimental (as of now in man page).

openzfs also doesn’t reencrypt dedup blocks if dedup is enabled Tom Caputi’s talk, but dedup can just be disabled

unhinge OP ,

if you happen to find the comparison, could you link it here

rtxn ,

My experience with btrfs is “oh shit I forgot to set up subvolumes”. Other than that, it just works. No issues whatsoever.

unhinge OP ,

oh shit I forgot to set up subvolumes

lol

I’m also planning on using its subvolume and snapshot feature. since zfs also supports native encryption, it’ll be easier to manage subvolums for backups

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