[plug] Filesystems for lots of inodes

[Brad Campbell]

On 4/1/20 1:01 pm, Bill Kenworthy wrote:

> Hi Brad,
> 
>      I have had a lot of pain from ext4 over the years and have really 
> only started using it again seriously recently ... and I must admit, its 
> a lot better than it was but I will move off it when I get time - been 
> burnt by it too often.
> 
> reiserfs3 was my goto for inode problems in the past (its still there, 
> and I think maintained) but I moved to btrfs after the Hans Reiser saga 
> and while it has its ups and downs, stability under punishment that 
> kills ext3/4 with live scrub and snapshots made it great.
> 
> Currently I am moving to moosefs on xfs and am impressed - particularly 
> with xfs so far. Live power off, various failure tests etc. and I have 
> not lost any data.
> 
> For backup I use moosefs snapshots and borgbackup (main repository is 
> also on moosefs - daily + some data is 10 minutely, as well as an 
> offline borgbackup on btrfs removable drive, this once a week or so) as 
> the backup software.  I previously used dirvish for many years though it 
> had a tendency to eat ext4 file systems, it was great on reiserfs and 
> btrfs.
> 
> Hope this helps with ideas.

G'day Bill,

It does. Thanks. Interesting how peoples experiences differ. I've always 
used ext[234], abused them severely and never lost a byte.

My only foray into an alternative filesystem was helping a mate with a 
large btrfs layout, but after it "ran out of space" and ate about 13T of 
his data, and the response from the developers was "yeah, it can do 
that" we never looked at it again. A bit like bcache, it always seemed 
to be "almost there as long as you only use it in certain circumstances 
that never expose the corner cases".

I'll have a serious play with xfs and see how it performs. I know all 
the little NAS WD Mybooks I've bought over the years have all had xfs as 
their main storage pool, but I've always converted them to ext[234].

I'll add moosefs and borgbackup to my long list of "must take a look at 
that one day".

Regards,
Brad
-- 
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful
experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very
narrow field. - Niels Bohr