mhbell Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 Well I learned another hard lesson about the BTRFS file system. I installed the latest Linux Mint 19 last week when it was released. I installed it using BTRFS on one SSD and installed using EXT4 on another SSD. When I went to Back up the new install using BTRFS to a External Drive with all of the Updates installed. I found that It will only backup to a BTRFS partition. Wish I had known that. So I backed it up to my root partition. I have three partitions, root, swap, and home. had a problem installing some files and went to the backup. it not only borked my Hard drive but eliminated my Windows boot manager. What a mess. I reinstalled Windows and will reinstall Mint 19 using EXT4 file system. I cannot see any advantage using the BTRFS. Only problems. The tried and true is best for me. I know better, but with spare hard drives I can experiment. Mel Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 Well it is supposed to be where you can do easy backups but I stick with the tried and true Ext4. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ebrke Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 I'm going to have to be careful on my next OpenSuse install. I carelessly let the default of BTRFS stand last time, and was sorry. Snapshots kept crowding my root partition and I had to resort to routinely going in and deleting them. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunrat Posted July 5, 2018 Share Posted July 5, 2018 BTRFS sounds good in theory. I've heard too many stories like this to ever use it. Maybe it's ok for some kind of professional use. ext4 & rsync backups ftw (rsnapsot is working well now but maybe overkill for me). There's a user called bester69 on Debian forums who swears by it. He often installs programs from outside the repository and advocates lots of Windows programs via Wine. The fact that he uses it definitely scares me off! 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted July 6, 2018 Share Posted July 6, 2018 Meh... I remember a similar episode from my early Slackware daze. Back then Slack was installed by default with ReiserFS as the file system. ReiserFS was actually an outstanding FS. Unfortunately, development on this file system became a bit spotty after Hans Reiser was convicted and sent to jail for murdering his wife. Ext2, 3, and 4 for me, thank you! 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fuddster Posted July 14, 2018 Share Posted July 14, 2018 I've been leery of BTRFS on my openSuse install until last week when I borked my system trying to install and configure VNC to interface with my Raspberry Pi. I was able to roll back to a previous snapshot without an issue. No problems since then. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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