BTRFS Stability Debate

The cluster focuses on debates about the current stability, reliability, and safety of the BTRFS filesystem, including personal anecdotes of data loss or successful long-term use, RAID issues, and comparisons to ZFS.

📉 Falling 0.4x DevOps & Infrastructure
3,094
Comments
19
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#7721
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Keywords

COW SSD OK HDD freebsd.org RAID synology.com index.php keep.all NAS btrfs zfs raid filesystem stable backups data kernel unstable home

Sample Comments

_joel • Feb 19, 2023 • View on HN

How is btrfs nowadays? I have PTSD from it and stick to ZFS now.

ilyt • Aug 20, 2023 • View on HN

BTRFS doesn't exactly had great history with fs bugs

Jnr • Nov 30, 2020 • View on HN

I'm using btrfs and my system still works. :)

zozbot234 • Oct 11, 2025 • View on HN

btrfs RAID is quite infamous for eating your data. Has it been fixed recently?

iso8859-1 • Apr 22, 2013 • View on HN

Btrfs is unstable too. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5460449

nialv7 • Jul 26, 2024 • View on HN

btrfs is not stable, at least not for me. it lost my data only a couple months ago. no power cut, no disk failure, data just gone.

graton • Jun 19, 2021 • View on HN

Counter anecdotal view point, I've been using BTRFS over the last 4 years now on multiple drives and multiple systems. No data loss has occurred.

guipsp • Oct 11, 2022 • View on HN

BTRFS is pretty stable nowadays.

pojntfx • Jan 27, 2020 • View on HN

Love using Btrfs; the is no better filesystem than it nowadays that it's reliability issues have been fixed.

rleigh • Jun 16, 2015 • View on HN

In theory, yes. Unfortunately, every time my Btrfs filesystems have encountered a hardware glitch, it has happily trashed the filesystem beyond recovery (including both drives in a RAID1 mirror, one of which was perfectly OK). I use ZFS now, and while some features are compatable with Btrfs, the implementation quality, documentation, and feature completeness, and tool quality set it well above where Btrfs is at.