36 engineers on Hacker News describe using Btrfs first-hand: 9 endorse it, 15 regret it, 8 are mixed.
“I use BTRFS in prod since I think 2016 which was also the last year I lost data to an BTRFS Bug”
mixed · production · 9 yr · kiney · 2025-11-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For a while we had a lot of issues with BTRFS filesystems, and we ended up making some EDA to run the btrfs balance”
regret · production · al_borland · 2025-10-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“While I've caught some snags with btrfs, I've never lost any data.”
mixed · personal · jchw · 2024-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's the only filesystem I've lost data to. Ditto for friends.”
regret · personal · KennyBlanken · 2024-12-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I recently tried btrfs on a new USB thumb drive. I immediately got hard freezes of my main (Linux) OS while working with the USB stick.”
regret · personal · sevg · 2024-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“As little as one year ago I experienced damage on a lightly used btrfs root partition on my laptop. Never again.”
regret · personal · 1 yr · greenavocado · 2024-07-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The 3x20TB btrfs setup I mentioned is configured with RAID1C3 for metadata, and RAID1 for data, and works just fine”
endorse · personal · antongribok · 2024-02-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“A few of the servers that predated me were set up with BTRFS raid 10 as their backup strategy. Basically stop the server, snapshot the volume, backup from the snapshot.”
mixed · production · mattpallissard · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run BTRFS on our work laptops and have been for a few years now.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · freeqaz · 2022-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“BTRFS RAID has routinely burned me every time I have given it the opportunity.”
regret · production · bravetraveler · 2022-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“except BTRFS, it ate a mirror on my desktop”
regret · personal · salmo · 2021-05-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have been using it on my personal machines for nearly a decade and not had any issues.”
endorse · personal · 9 yr · Thev00d00 · 2020-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our entire company was offline for a day when our central storage server quit accepting writes despite having over 50% free space.”
regret · production · Volundr · 2020-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I haven't had any issues with it.”
endorse · personal · bluedino · 2020-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“So, I was a happy btrfs user until I discovered how bad its tooling is. No issues with bugs or anything though.”
mixed · personal · 5 yr · Aardwolf · 2020-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've also been using btrfs for 5+ years. ... The most annoying issue I've run into ... was being low on space and it being really hard to free some”
mixed · personal · 5 yr · solarkraft · 2020-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I had exactly the same selling point on btrfs as the author - I see a "huge" 7.8TB RAID1”
endorse · personal · archi42 · 2020-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In about 4 years of running it on a couple of servers and countless virtuals/desktops, I've never had a reliability issue that was directly related to btrfs.”
endorse · production · 4 yr · mdip · 2020-01-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Does anyone use BtrFS in production? ... And yes, I use it everywhere.”
endorse · production · ernst_klim · 2019-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Btrfs has a bad reputation because to many people lost data, including me. I would never again use Btrfs, only ZFS.”
regret · personal · nickik · 2019-10-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“our org lost the data after the sudden power failure. Maybe this was our fault, be we switched to XFS on the very same hardware”
regret · production · theamk · 2019-05-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it was too unreliable with large snapshot turnover rapidly unbalancing the filesystem. Unusable in production.”
regret · personal · rleigh · 2018-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My experiences have been similar. Btrfs is a great backup stress tool.”
endorse · personal · deno · 2018-11-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the tigerite kernel does not boot because of some BTRFS crash (divide by zero)”
regret · personal · AlbertoGP · 2016-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the whole experience will keep me from ever using btrfs”
regret · production · nisa · 2016-08-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“that was our joke for btrfs right before we switched to xfs with Ceph for our OpenStack product. ... nothing catastrophic like the customer problems with btfs where we knew the data had been written, but recover was not reasonable.”
regret · production · lloydde · 2015-04-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“While the snapshot features were nice, the write performance was abysmal.”
regret · production · s_kilk · 2014-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We were on zfs and brtfs because it allowed for easy and quick backups via snapshots... excessive fragmentation after a while.”
regret · production · bhouston · 2014-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using BTRFS in production for over a year now (and heavily with Docker) and haven't suffered any problems at all”
endorse · production · 1 yr · mrmondo · 2014-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using btrfs on several machines for about 3 years. It is not stable”
mixed · personal · 3 yr · rogerbinns · 2014-12-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I haven't had any real problem beyond the annoyance of being unable to remove snapshots”
mixed · personal · rbanffy · 2010-08-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it is still not in "production quality". It's in the mainline kernel, it works (I recently converted my / to btrfs)”
mixed · personal · thingie · 2010-06-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“.snapshots being the btrfs snapshot tree”
neutral · personal · cookiecaper · 2016-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we moved off of btrfs onto ext4 + overlayfs as soon as overlayfs became a viable option in late 2014”
neutral · production · philips · 2016-06-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Have you tried btrfs on an md RAID device (for interest)? We've run it for a while, but we don't care too much about performance.”
neutral · production · xioxox · 2016-05-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Backups are done over the local network from the "home server" to a big encrypted btrfs usb drive (so we get snapshots).”
neutral · personal · unhammer · 2013-10-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?