I chose BTRFS for my two array disks and two parity disks. Also for a separate disk for the cache. Did I make a mistake by not using XFS? I have moved my data over, approximately 5 Tb, and have had 0 issues and been rock stable for a month now.

 

After doing more reading I see XFS allows more plugins and features, or am I wrong? I was interested in having bitrot protection, which is why I picked BTRFS initially, unawares that there are excellent tools in plugins to check for file integrity on XFS and fix them. Should I consider converting to XFS, or just be content with what I have?

 

Thanks for the input!

Would not have thought it was worth moving to XFS if BTRFS is stable for you.    The only reason I can think of preferring XFS is if your system regularity crashes as XFS seems to be slightly more tolerant to crashes.    However if you are having regular crashes you have a problem that needs resolving iregardless of your file system choice.

 

not sure why you think there are features available for XFS that are not available if you went with BTRFS.    If anything I would think it was the other way around.

5 hours ago, itimpi said:

Would not have thought it was worth moving to XFS if BTRFS is stable for you.    The only reason I can think of preferring XFS is if your system regularity crashes as XFS seems to be slightly more tolerant to crashes.    However if you are having regular crashes you have a problem that needs resolving iregardless of your file system choice.

 

not sure why you think there are features available for XFS that are not available if you went with BTRFS.    If anything I would think it was the other way around.

Well, I'm getting familiar with these file systems and turning to people with more experience for advice. This explains why my initial question seems nonsensical. I suppose my next question would be whether I can expect good results trying to use the Dynamix file integrity plugin with BTRFS, or should I look to another solution?

Edited September 2, 20214 yr by Freedomfries

@JorgeBwill correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure the default settings for BTRFS automatically detect file corruption on all read requests, making the file integrity plugin redundant. BTRFS scrub triggers a checksum detection sweep across the volume manually.

5 hours ago, Freedomfries said:

Well, I'm getting familiar with these file systems and turning to people with more experience for advice. This explains why my initial question seems nonsensical. I suppose my next question would be whether I can expect good results trying to use the Dynamix file integrity plugin with BTRFS, or should I look to another solution?

As was mentioned the Dynamix File Integrity plugin is redundant if using BTRFS as detection of file level corruption is built into BTRFS.

 

One important thing is that BTRFS can detect that file corruption has occurred, but it is still up to you to have a backup process in place so that if this occurs you can then restore a ‘good’ copy from your backups.    The same would apply if you use XFS in conjunction with the Dynamix File Integrity plugin.

Understood thank you. How do you find a file corruption report using BTRFS?

I would expect to be able to restore a corrupted file from the parity volume, since you can restore it if the drive fails... but I guess you need a backup. Interesting.

10 minutes ago, Freedomfries said:

How do you find a file corruption report using BTRFS?

You can monitor btrfs filesystem for corruption (and other) errors, if data corruption is found a scrub will list the affected files in the syslog.

 

17 minutes ago, Freedomfries said:

I would expect to be able to restore a corrupted file from the parity volume, since you can restore it if the drive fails..

It would be possible if you knew corruption happened on the data device and parity wasn't corrected, like after actual bit rot, but most corruptions are caused by other factors, and from those not easy or possible to recover from parity, and since each array drive is a single device filesystem and doesn't have redundancy it also can't be fixed by btrfs, that's just one many reasons why backups of anything important are still needed.

47 minutes ago, Freedomfries said:

I would expect to be able to restore a corrupted file from the parity volume, since you can restore it if the drive fails... but I guess you need a backup. Interesting.

Parity is about recovering a failed drive, and has no understanding of the data on any drive as it works at the physical sector level so it cannot be used to recover individual files.