On Fri, 8 Nov 2013, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
Quoting Russell Coker (russell@coker.com.au):
For reliable data storage on Linux the options are ZFS and BTRFS.
I'm really curious: Are you quite sure those are more reliable than ext4 or ext3 (in their default metadata journaling/write modes)?
For performance, especially on very large volumes, there I'm sure you are right, if only on account of excessive fsck times. (I notice you said the machine that handles your mail, which seems to imply modest filesystem size.) However, that was not the criterion you mentioned, but rather reliability.
I have laughably little data, but my naive suspicion is that both ext3 and ext4 are significantly more reliable than the other two.
In terms of having a system reliably boot up and just start working zfsonlinux performs poorly. My experience is that I had to hack the system start scripts every time because they just don't work properly. As ZFS isn't properly free software I'm not going to spend the extra effort in fixing it properly and sending patches upstream. ZFS also isn't so good for long term upgrades. I'm not looking forward to upgrading a file server running Debian/Squeeze to Jessie - I'm anticipating that the downtime and hassle of the upgrade makes it not worth upgrading to Wheezy unless I rebuild it with bigger disks before Jessie comes out. But one of the biggest benefits of BTRFS and ZFS is the fact that they have checksums on everything. With the volumes of data that everyone has it's not practical to do manual checks. You have to have a filesystem that does checks or accept the fact that eventually data will just disappear. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/