this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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The big struggle I see folks have with BTRFS is reclaiming space. However, that is with something like snap-pac and snapper setup.
The features of BTRFS are nice. Just a bit of a learning curve from my experience.
I run a desktop and laptop with BTRFS.
Fedora, like OpenSUSE that has btrfs by default, should be running scheduled scripts to do scrub, maintenance and dump old snapshots (either by number of snapshots or by age) on its own. Others having issue with btrfs are probably manually setting it up and not knowing the options or don't have scripts that run on the back end. Having said that I do notice the partitions suggested for root are highly conservative, I usually add 30% on top of suggested root size and haven't had issues in 7+ years
If you're running btrfs manually and don't setup clean up scripts I'm slightly confused how you get into trouble in the first place since that also means there won't be any automated snapshots.
You can assign auto snapshots or create on demand, but whether or not you have a maintenance tool that does scrub, cleaning whatever is another story. I guess my point was something that has Btrfs as default install will also have some curation around the tools that optimize that system
I guess I just feel like if you're manually configuring BTRFS you'll either use it like a regular FS, or you'll set it up to make use of the features in which case you'll probably setup both automatic snapshots and cleanup. Possibly with auto scrubbing too. I don't really see a situation where someone who manually opts to use it sets up snapshotting manually and then doesn't setup any form of cleanup.
If you browse the webs so many people with "Help my drive is full of snapshots, what do I do?". If there is a failure mode people will find it. Whereas a curated distro is OOTB ready to go without user intervention.
Oh, absolutely not saying it isn't user misconfiguration. I need to revisit my autoscrub setup and my maintenance tasks.
Just something to be aware of.