Comment by fgonzag
6 years ago
Take a cursory look into both codebases, the stability of the every feature at launch and on maintenance. It's not hard to see BTRFS is a doomed project. Bcachefs is more like PostgreSQL, the developer doesn't add features until he has a solid design that's well thought out. Hence why he hasn't implemented snapshots.
I don't think too many people consider it stable enough for production, either. (Unless you count a very limited subset of its functionality).
I rather run Bcachefs today than Btrfs, by a mile. At least with bcachefs I won't lose my data.
If you are on BTRFS and you encounter an unrecoverable bug (which seems to be reasonably common), the developers will most likely recommend you wipe the drive and restore from backups (because you had backups, right?)
Even if the data is still on the drive and a bugfix would make the filesystem recoverable again, they don't have the time/knowledge/resources to untangle that codebase and make fixes. Even BTRFS developers don't trust the filesystem with their own data.
If you are on Bcachefs and you encounter an unrecoverable bug, the developer will ask for some logs, or reproduction steps, or potentially even remote debugging access to your corrupt filesystem.
And then he will fix the bug, releasing a new version that can read/repair your filesystem. He knows his codebase like the back of hand.
In my research, I couldn't find any examples of someone actually losing data due to Bcachefs. All the bugs appeared to be "data has been written to drive, but bug prevented reading"
While I would still hesitate to trust Bcachefs, I would trust it way more than BTRFS.
Just want to note that bcachefs looks great (I was sort of tangentially aware but hadn't dedicated significant attention to it).
Definitely something to try out (backing up my home servers is just about to reach viability for me, so I'd definitely consider switching to it in that use case).
Thanks!