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From what I understand, aside from certain RAID levels, btrfs is production-ready. RAID5 and RAID6 don't have recovery code finished yet, but RAID0, RAID1, "dup" which just keeps 2 copies of each chunk, and "single" mode all work fine.


I've setup btrfs on software mdraid (raid 6) as a backup system (not the only backup!). You still get the checksums and snapshotting, but not the flexibility of the btrfs raid system. It has the advantage of being easy to grow, unlike zfs, which can't be resized once created. We've encountered no problems, even though it has been running for around three years of rsyncing and snapshotting.


zfs can grow - new vdevs can be added, and existing vdevs can have their disks replaced one at a time with larger disks.

A bigger downside of ZFS, IMO, is lack of defragmentation and similar larger scale pool management. If you ever push a ZFS pool close to its space limit, you can end up with fragmentation that never really goes away, even if you delete lots of files. The recommended solution is to recreate the pool and restore from backup, or create a new pool and stream a snapshot across with zfs send | zfs receive. Not terribly practical for most home users.


zfs can sort of grow by adding vdevs, as you say, however it's pretty wasteful due to the new parity drives It was much more efficient to expand the mdraid raid 6 and expand the btrfs onto that. The other backup server does use zfs (albeit the user mode fuse version). I set up that system in a similar way putting zfs-fuse on mdraid 6.




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