Btrfs Tips and Best Practices

Documentation

Best Btrfs documentation when working with btrfs (in production), for those brave hearts who would like to try and use it on a daily basis;-)

NOTE: Btrfs is experimental and under heavy development. Don’t use it to store critical data. DO backup your data (good idea to place backup on a ext4 file system, don’t put all eggs in one basket) before trying it out. No one can save you without good backups;-)

1. Btrfs fun – Funtoo Linux Wiki
2. Chapter 5. The Btrfs File System- Oracle Linux 6 – Administrator’s Solutions Guide

Useful tips based on practice

Tips and best practices

1. Try NOT to use use Btrfs for /, especially when you ONLY have a single block device (partition)
   NOTE: Metadata will by default be duplicated inside the single device (unless you explicitly specify -m single when creating the file system, dangerous!), however, you ONLY have 1 copy of data.
2. Recommend using btrfs for LXC – (Linux Containers) backingstore
   LXC works very well with Btrfs, it makes use of Btrfs snapshot feature to clone containers. When using lxc-create, the -B need NOT to be specified as it will be used automatically if the /var/lib/lxc filesystem is found to be Btrfs.
3. If possible, use at least 2 block devices (can be 2 partitions or 2 physical devices), to mirror data – RAID1, of course RAID10 is even better
   Example: mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/sdc /dev/sdd metadata is by default replicated on all devices so you don’t have to explicitly specify -m raid1
4. Don’t trust df -hT output, use btrfs filesystem df /mount_point instead
5. Use compression – LZO recommended to improve file system throughput
   Example: mount -o compress=lzo,subvol=subvol /dev/sdd /mnt/subvol
   NOTE: compression can be enabled on a subvolume basis. Also, it can be enabled after creating the file system, at any time. DO remember to run a btrfs filesystem defragment file or btrfs filesystem defrag directory to apply compression to existing data. Mounting the subvol without compression option, data is still accessible (NOT sure if mv cpor edit will change the compression state though, comment if you know).
6. ONLY keep a minimum set of snapshots
   Think in Copy-on-Write, data blocks are NOT duplicated between a mounted subvolume and its snapshot unless changes are made to the files (a snapshot can occupy nearly zero extra space on the disk).  As time goes by, more and more data blocks will be changed and it silently eats up disk space.
   NOTE: Btrfs snapshots are writable! ZFS snapshots are read-only.
7. A drawback of having snapshots
   If in the original file system some files get deleted, the snapshot still contains them and the disk blocks CANNOT be claimed as free space. Remember to delete unwanted snapshots (just like deleting subvolumes) and keep a minimal set of them (tip #5).
8. Turn OFF  system auto backup features (a snapshot will be created before system update, Oracle Linux yum-plugin-fs-snapshot plugin does this, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE do the same in a similar way). It eats up your disk space if you don’t keep an eye and don’t give a shit;-)
9. Clone / snapshot single file using cp --reflink
   Btrfs supports creation of clones for individual files. Clones are lightweight copies (CoW) – only an inode is created, and it shares the same disk blocks as the original file.
10. You can mount subvolumes
    Example: mount -t btrfs -o subvol=subvol_name device /mnt/subvol 
11. You can mount snapshots to restore data
    For full system recovery using snapshots, you’ll need to use Back To the Future, either 1. fiddle the default subvol number or 2. use the kernel command line parameters in the bootloader configuration files. Refer to the Funtoo wiki for details.
    Example: mount -t btrfs -o subvol=snapshot-id device /mnt/snapshot
12. Use mount option mount -o space_cache to speed up boot and gain slight performance improvement
    When the Btrfs file system is mounted with the space_cache option, Btrfs is able to store the free space cache on the disk to make the caching of a block group much quicker. Without this support, Btrfs has to scan the entire tree each time looking for space that can be allocated.
13. Last but not least, keep your kernel up-to-date, use the cutting edge stable kernel

btrfsck

BTW: Where the hell is btrfsck ?

The instructions on Funtoo wiki is out-of-date. Chris Mason has changed the branch name from donteveruse to dangerdonteveruse shit!

So the instructions:

# git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mason/btrfs-progs.git
# cd btrfs-progs/
# git checkout dangerdonteveruse
Switched to branch 'dangerdonteveruse'
# make

NOTE: I updated the Funto wiki page and now it is up-to-date.

Recommended reading: How I Use The Advanced Capabilities of Btrfs