On 02/04/2024 13:53, David Christensen wrote:
Does anyone have any comments or suggestions regarding how to use magnetic hard disk drives, commodity x86 computers, and Debian for long-term data storage with ensured integrity?
I use Btrfs, on all my systems, including some servers, with soft Raid1 and Raid10 modes (because these modes are considered stable and production ready). I decided on Btrfs not ZFS, because Btrfs allows to migrate drives on the fly while partition is live and heavily used, replace them with different sizes and types, mixed capacities, change Raid levels, change amount of drives too. I could go from single drive to Raid10 on 4 drives and back while my data is 100% available at all times. It saved my bacon many times, including hard checksum corruption on NVMe drive which otherwise I would never know about. Thanks to Btrfs I located the corrupted files, fixed them, got hardware replaced under warranty. Also helped with corrupted RAM: Btrfs just refused to save file because saved copy couldn't match read checksum from the source due to RAM bit flips. Diagnosed, then replaced memory, all good. I like a lot when one of the drives get ATA reset for whatever reason, and all other drives continue to read and write, I can continue using the system for hours, if I even notice. Not possible in normal circumstances without Raid. Once the problematic drive is back, or after reboot if it's more serious, then I do "scrub" command and everything is resynced again. If I don't do that, then Btrfs dynamically correct checksum errors on the fly anyway. And list goes on - I've been using Btrfs for last 5 years, not a single problem to date, it survived hard resets, power losses, drive failures, countless migrations.
[1] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15526 [2] https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/15933
Problems reported here are from Linux kernel 6.5 and 6.7 on Gentoo system. Does this even affects Debian Stable with 6.1 LTS? -- With kindest regards, Piotr. ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian - The universal operating system ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://www.debian.org/ ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
