Hello everyone. I’m going to build a new PC soon and I’m trying to maximize its reliability all I can. I’m using Debian Bookworm. I have a 1TB M2 SSD to boot on and a 4TB SATA SSD for storage. My goal is for the computer to last at least 10 years. It’s for personal use and work, playing games, making games, programming, drawing, 3d modelling etc.
I’ve been reading on filesystems and it seems like the best ones to preserve data if anything is lost or corrupted or went through a power outage are BTRFS and ZFS. However I’ve also read they have stability issues, unlike Ext4. It seems like a tradeoff then?
I’ve read that most of BTRFS’s stability issues come from trying to do RAID5/6 on it, which I’ll never do. Is everything else good enough? ZFS’s stability issues seem to mostly come from it having out-of-tree kernel modules, but how much of a problem is this in real-life use?
So far I’ve been thinking of using BTRFS for the boot drive and ZFS for the storage drive. But maybe it’s better to use BTRFS for both? I’ll of course keep backups but I would still like to ensure I’ll have to deal with stuff breaking as little as possible.
Thank you in advance for the advice.
Been using BTRFS for several years and have never once had any sort of issue. i just choose BTRFS at system setup and never think about it again. I like that when I copy a file it is INSTANT and makes my computer feel super fast, whereas EXT4 can take several minutes to copy large files. This is with similar use to what you describe. No RAID.
If you’re not intending to use complicated RAID setups, just go with btrfs. There is no reason to bother with zfs given your specs and needs.
Do not go with ext4. Unlike both btrfs and zfs, ext4 does not do data checksumming, meaning it cannot detect bit rot (and obviously cannot fix it either). You’ll also be missing out on other modern features, like compression and copy-on-write and all the benefits that entails. Once you start using snapshots for incremental backups using
btrfs send(or its zfs equivalent), you’ll never want to go back. Recommended script: snap-sync.ext4 + mdadm + dm-integrity would solve the bit rot problem. But you’d end up with a lot of parts bolted together and still miss out on the features that btrfs/zfs provide.
I just reinstalled my home lab server with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. There was no choice in file system type.
Is it possible to convert from ext4 to btrfs?
If I should rather re-reinstall the server, how do I set the file system type during setup?
It is possible to convert from ext4 to btrfs, but if you just installed the server it may be easier to just reinstall.
Ubuntu setup wizard doesn’t offer btrfs, and the manual override requires me to set up all the partitions myself. I am not that good at Linux.
Ext4 with backups
