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
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

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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.