[clue] btrfs vs ZFS question

dennisjperkins dennisjperkins at comcast.net
Sun Mar 31 13:25:40 MDT 2019


Btrfs seems more flexible for snapshots, but that can also mean more  complicated if you are not careful.  You can only take snapshots of a subvolume.  You might not want a snapshot if everything in /,  like /home or /temp, but if you make these subvolumes, a snapshot of / will not include them because Btrfs won't include embedded subvolumes in a snapshot. Sent from my Galaxy Tab® S2
-------- Original message --------From: Sean LeBlanc <seanleblanc at comcast.net> Date: 3/31/19  11:39 AM  (GMT-07:00) To: clue at cluedenver.org Subject: Re: [clue] btrfs vs ZFS question 
    I think he might have meant me, but you
      saw it first and probably had more info anyway, so it works out.
      :)
    
    
    My experience with ZFS has - so far -
      been somewhat at arms' length. I've been using it via FreeNAS and
      about the only thing I've done of any consequence is replace each
      drive, let it resilver, then move on to the other, until the
      entire set has been expanded. *knocks on wood* I kind of want this
      sort of storage to be boring, but reliable.
    
    
    
    From what I can tell - and I only
      looked a little bit about 5 years ago or so - btrfs has more
      promise as far as features, and is not a pain to get to work under
      Linux (as opposed to things like ZoL), but in the opinion of some
      at the time, btrfs seemed a bit more, um, sketchy. ZFS had the
      advantage of a lot of research early on by Sun/Oracle, and then
      the OpenZFS fork made it for the world and move beyond just
      Solaris. It's a shame that it seems mostly still confined to
      FreeBSD. I don't mind FreeBSD, and actually like a few things
      about it, but I realize that easy Linux interop is going to make
      adoption much higher.
    
    
    Seems that btrfs is much more mature
      now and probably has more features than OpenZFS? Since Dennis'
      links prompted me to do more reading on it again, it does seem the
      CoW feature per file is an interesting one for sure, if I
      understand it correctly.
    
    
    Also based on comments or in articles
      themselves, I still may take a Pi and use that as a way of
      shipping deltas from my ZFS pools to a Pi running FreeBSD. Someone
      had mentioned they were doing incremental backups of very large
      dataset (53Tb?) to a Pi in this way. Seems a good way to have some
      (extra) assurances of your data - at least if you are already
      using ZFS.
    
    
    
    On 3/27/19 9:33 PM, Shawn Perry wrote:
    
    
      
      
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        I’m assuming you mean me, so I’ll answer.
         
        
          You can add.
            You should add in the same pattern that already exists to
            maintain performance and redundancy. If you have a 4 disk
            raid 5, you should add 4 more disks in a raid 5 config.
          
            You cannot
              remove yet. 0.8x will allow removing, but only to cover
              accidental adds.
          
          You can
            resize up. If you replace a disk with a larger one, you can
            expand the space. If you add more disks, you can use the
            extra space.
          
            You cannot
              shrink or remove.
          
          The data
            does not need balancing unless you add disks. To rebalance,
            you would need to re-copy the data. You can use send/recv to
            do that. You’d need to stop things to do this. The actual
            stoppage will be only the amount of time it takes you to
            type “zfs rename <source> <destination>” twice.
            Once to move the old out of the way, once to move the new
            back to the original location.
          Sorta. You
            can split mirrors in a raid 1 or raid 10 config to drop down
            to a single disk or raid 0, respectively. You cannot reshape
            like md or btrfs.
        
         
        
          From:
            Dennis J Perkins
            Sent: Wednesday, March 27, 2019 9:23 PM
            To: CLUE's mailing list
            Subject: [clue] btrfs vs ZFS question
        
         
        Sean, does ZFS let you do these things?
         
        Btrfs lets you do the following without
          stopping anything:
         
        1. Add or remove partitions.  If you remove
          a partition, make sure the
        remaining drives have enough capacity.
        2. Resize a btrfs system.
        3. Balance the data.
        4. Switch between single disk, RAID 0, RAID
          1, or RAID 10 configs.
         
        Shuffling data around as a result of any of
          these operatins is done in
        the background and might take hours.
         
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