Re: [gentoo-user] experience thus far

[William Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au>]

On 17/05/14 04:15, Marc Joliet wrote:
> So, a week has passed since my conversion to btrfs.
> 
> So far there seem to have been no problems, my system has been running as if
> nothing has changed :) . Which, as a friend pointed out, is how it should be.
> 
> I don't think there is anything particularly interesting to mention in addition
> to what I already wrote. I can just say that I think the effort was worth it.
> 
> The one thing that I can tell from reading the past two weeks of the btrfs ML
> is that the 3.15 Linux kernel series will contain lots of bug fixes (for
> example in balancing, error handling, and send/receive), and that I will want
> to use that sooner rather than later. Of course, the severity of the problems
> varies, and a lot are triggered under odd, or at least uncommon, circumstances.
> Still, its worth paying attention to.
> 
> Also, a lot of problem reports I saw came from people using other volume
> management below btrfs, interestingly enough.
> 
> As for the future, I think I will wait a while, and get some experience with
> btrfs first.  I suspect that by the time btrfs supports swap files, it will be
> stable enough that I would consider converting my SSD to also use btrfs
> anyway :) . Possibly before that, once I am fully convinced of btrfs'
> stability, I will also convert my backup drive and switch to using snapshots
> and send/receive to perform backups. Perhaps somebody will have written a
> backup solution on top of snapshots by then.
> 
> Have a nice weekend,
> 

Don't forget to have a maintenance program - run a scrub regularly once
a week or so - I have enough btrfs drives (22 qemu files, 4 WD Greens
att) to see about one or two scrub fixable errors a week with no obvious
cause, sometimes serious (in a critical file).  My experience is that if
you ignore these errors they seem to increase over time resulting in a
crash and burn.  Keep an eye on your logs as btrfs will list the errors
there as well ("grep -i btrfs /var/log/messages").  For the ones scrub
cant fix, delete the file and restore from backup.  Errors that require
off-line fixing (btrfsck) are the ones where I have lost file systems -
though I have not seen this in the last 6 months.

I am quite practised in restoring from backups because of btrfs :)

BillK