BTRFS Best Practices -

I’ve been using BTRFS for years and have encountered few problems. Some of them are small and can be avoided with some smart improvements. The following advice is based on my experience.

You can find posts online arguing against these options, so your mileage may vary.

Fragmentation, speed and compression

If using rotating disks, employ the space_cache and autodefrag options. The latter can slow down writes but will keep the disk in a usable state for a long time. Otherwise, fragmentation may become a problem.

Generally speaking, I use compression. Modern CPUs are much faster than rotating disks, so compressing data before writing saves space and often improves speed.

Filesystem stats and status

Periodically, check the file system status with the command “btrfs fi df [mountpoint].” Here’s an example:

Data, RAID1: total=1.42TiB, used=1.40TiB
System, RAID1: total=32.00MiB, used=256.00KiB
Metadata, RAID1: total=12.00GiB, used=4.68GiB
GlobalReserve, single: total=512.00MiB, used=0.00B

The numbers are quite similar (except for metadata), so no action is needed. Sometimes they’re different, and you might encounter a strange situation: you see a lot of free space, but you can’t write anymore as the disk appears to be full.

This can happen when the total (allocated) reaches the disk’s space, but the used amount is lower. You have space, but you can’t use it. A balance will fix this issue.

Perform some manual operations

Ideally, professional file systems should auto-heal and auto-clean. For example, ZFS autoscrubs data periodically. BTRFS still lacks some of these automatic operations, so it’s recommended to perform some maintenance. I run them via cron.

My daily job looks like this:

/bin/btrfs fi ba start -dusage=50 -dlimit=2 -musage=50 -mlimit=4 mountpoint

This operation checks and rebalances only a subset of blocks that meet specific conditions. This ensures that the operation only lasts a few minutes. Scheduling it daily will, over time, result in a clean situation.

My weekly job looks like this:

/bin/btrfs scrub start -B -d -c 2 -n 4 mountpoint

This command performs a scrub, checking blocks and detecting (and, if possible, correcting) errors. It’s a longer operation, so I don’t perform it daily.

I’ve been using BTRFS since 2012, and thanks to these operations, it still rocks.Its capabilities have helped me in many situations.

I also use BTRFS for my Linux desktop PCs to have snapshots and consistent backups.

Fragmentation, speed and compression

Filesystem stats and status

Perform some manual operations

See also