btrfs

What is btrfs?

Btrfs is a modern, feature-rich filesystem designed for Linux systems. It focuses on advanced functionality while prioritizing fault tolerance, repair capabilities, and ease of administration. Btrfs implements a copy-on-write (CoW) architecture, allowing for efficient storage utilization and data protection

Highlights

• Self-healing capabilities in certain configurations, leveraging the CoW nature of the filesystem
• Online defragmentation and automatic defrag options for seamless performance optimization
• Dynamic volume management, supporting online growth, shrinkage, and block device addition/removal
• Online balancing, enabling movement of data objects between block devices for load balancing
• Offline filesystem check and online data scrubbing for error detection and automatic remediation
• Support for various RAID configurations, including RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 10
• Subvolumes providing separately mountable filesystem roots within a single disk partition
• Transparent compression using multiple algorithms, configurable at the file or volume level
• Atomic, writable, or read-only snapshots of subvolumes for efficient backups and rollbacks
• File cloning for copy-on-write operations, enabling efficient file duplication
• Checksums on data and metadata for enhanced data integrity
• In-place conversion from ext3/4 to Btrfs, with rollback capabilities
• Union mounting of read-only storage for efficient copy-on-write backing
• Block discard support for reclaiming space and improving SSD wear leveling
• Send/receive functionality for efficient snapshot-based backup and incremental backup operations
• Out-of-band data deduplication capabilities