[Discuss] BTRFS, ZFS, XFS .... Confused!!

[John Blomfield]

Following the recent comments on this list about Bit Rot and file 
systems I have been doing a little reading about the changes that are 
coming. Most of the discussion I confess is way above my head unless I 
do a lot more reading and studying. However, I would like to achieve 
some clarity over the short term until I have time and inclination to 
delve deeper myself.

My preferred Distro is OpenSuse and the latest version 13.2 is due to be 
released in 6 days and I will no doubt be giving it a test run in the 
next few weeks when the teething troubles have been sorted out with the 
normal early updates. Until now OpenSuse including the present 13.1, 
BTRFS has been an option during installation and referred to as "beta" 
but with 13.2 BTRFS is now the default file system but countless other 
file systems are available. Amongst these on OpenSuse are ZFS and XFS - 
what to do? Will any of these new file systems affect any applications 
or the system as a whole and prevent some apps running or perhaps limit 
their function?

My systems do not support RAID I only have room for one HD and one SSD 
on my desktop and my laptops have just one HD, plus various USB external 
drives, like most home users. Very little of my data could be regarded 
as mission critical, valuable or irreplaceable but its loss would be 
annoying or saddening.

I have cronjob backups locally daily, to an external drive weekly and 
off site monthly. My mini-cloud provides me with remote access to data I 
need when traveling without the risk of the clouds of "big data" 
companies being hacked. So does any of this debate about RAID, BTRFS, 
XFS and ZFS matter to me? Should I stick to good old ext4 or change to 
BTRFS etc? Clarity anyone?

John

-- 
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Notes http://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com