Comment on [PSA] Swapping your Deck's filesystem to Btrfs is easy to do, and can give you more space for free
yote_zip@pawb.social 1 year agoI’m interested to see that reported somewhere - the duperemove repo might be a good starting point as that’s generally the standard BTRFS dedupe solution. I don’t currently see any issues on the GitHub repo about corruption (or at least the last one was 7 years ago). Again, I’m not sure if a RAM bit flip could cause this during a dedupe. Just because you scrubbed, deduped, and scrubbed again doesn’t mean there wasn’t a bit flip during the dedupe.
As for btrfs-check
vs fsck
, there are just way fewer things that need to be repaired in BTRFS and ZFS because they are copy-on-write (ZFS doesn’t even have a fsck
at all!). Because Ext4 is not Copy-On-Write, it’s highly vulnerable to powerloss events, and an fsck
is required to replay the journal when this happens. BTRFS and ZFS make atomic COW transactions and will never be in a state of corruption on power loss. The other part of fsck
is repairing the filesystem, which BTRFS and ZFS do through scrub
and/or auto-heal on read instead. ZFS and BTRFS keep multiple copies of the filesystem metadata so that it can auto-repair itself while online. btrfs check
is not something that should be used lightly, and I’ve seen a lot of people just run btrfs-check --repair
expecting the same behavior as fsck
, then wonder why they ended up with a broken filesystem.