I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.
- What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
- What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
- What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
IMHO 99% of the time btrfs features are used as a band-aid for things that would be much better done otherwise. Generally by using a stable distro and a decent backup solution (like Debian + Borg). And you get to use a truly stable, proven, boring fs ike ext4 or xfs.
Stable yes, but no protection from bitrot, and the journal of ext4 is the band aid, instead of a cow fs like zfs or btrfs.
You can protect important data with backups, which you should do anyway, and in practice I feel like the added complexity of BTRFS and ZFS is not worth the COW.
BTRFS is cool but they tried to cram way too much too fast into it and it added a ton of complexity and it’s still not 100% done after all these years. A COW mode for ext4 would have been adopted much faster.