this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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Heed the 'downside' of using btrfs carefully before choosing that option over say, ext4, especially if you ever do a hard-shutdown, prone to power-outages, etc. It will scramble your system files.
Btrfs is made precisely so that a power outages don't do that! and you don't end up like ext4 with bad superblock nonsense.
Been using Btrfs for over 3 years at this point, 0 issues and over 400 unsafe shutdowns: https://imgur.com/a/AKXFdKb
In fact it was able to detect when my previous ssd was dying, I thought Btrfs was spewing nonsense until the next day when smartctl began to report issues as well lol.
I have had corrupt filesystem errors with BTRFS on both of my computers due to power outages and one hard shutdown (had to), that was the end of it. I will stick to ext4, a log file system that is more stable. Used ext4 for YEARS (I am old) and never had these issues with such frequency. Stick to what is hardened and solid, BTRFS is still under development. The fanboys love to use it as the next best thing, and it does have some nice features, but stability is not one of them, at least in these type of situations.
When did this happen? what error did you get?
Btrfs will explicitly go read only when it detects corruption, which is a good thing, with EXT4 you don't know what is going on until it is too late.
fwiw the only time I managed to get info from an user that had "issues" with btrfs, I discovered that what had happened is that they moved the partition that had snapshots, and if you don't know it, this is catastrophic because this unlinks all the snapshots and suddenly everything would take many times more storage.
The short time I've used EXT4 running into bad superblock errors was something that happened almost every week, but in the end I was always able to repair the disk and recover everything.
I'm from Venezuela, power failures are common here.