Re: Fixing errors on a BTRFS partition?
Hello,
On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 04:57:07PM -0600, Intense Red wrote:
> > Everything online hints that attempting repair is particularly
> > dangerous, but what else am I to do?
>
> You sum up my experience with BTRFS. I too was "scared" off from it and
> reformatted my BTRFS partitions and went back to ext4 -- it's a known
> quantity fit for humans with tons of advice of how to handle problems/errors.
I too don't have a lot of love for btrfs, but I think it is a bit
unfair to criticise it in this scenario, which is a failing SD card
with no redundancy. If there'd been redundancy then btrfs should
have noticed the problems and got the data from the other
copy/copies, but here it had no opportunity to do so.
In the same situation, ext4 would have just carried on until it got
read/write errors but this wouldn't have been any better. btrfs got
the same errors and reported more of its own that it noticed from
the incorrect checksums.
It sounds like the OP's use case didn't involve redundancy nor did
it involve any of the other btrfs features such as compression or
snapshots, so btrfs probably wasn't a good choice here. ext4 or XFS
may have been better here just because they are simpler. I can
understand not wanting to have a learning experience when it comes
to one's data.
The btrfs mailing list is pretty helpful. I think if one was not
scared to ask for help there regarding unfamiliar steps, btrfs in a
redundant configuration is pretty safe for your data. My gripes with
it over the years have been user interface, bugs and availability
issues, not resilience i.e. I've never lost data to it.
Having said that, I really do not trust things like SD cards or
CompactFlash cards (remember those? I still have one in service in a
firewall) for main storage unless they will be largely or entirely
read-only. In my mind they are more suited to phones and cameras and
similar devices.
Similarly, USB storage. Attaching a USB drive (or stick!) to an
Intel NUC or Raspberry Pi and exposing that over SMB is what some
people consider network attached storage, and I'm sure there's
people reading this who have done this for years and never had a
problem, but I've had and seen so many problems with non-trivial use
of USB storage. For myself, I'd want any long term setup to be
attached by SATA or NVMe or over network to same.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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