I run a Linux machine at home. It’s mostly a server, although sometimes I use it as a desktop. I use it for SSH, samba, and I have apache hosting family photos. The photos sit on a secondary drive, and lately it manifest sector errors. Some of photos were no longer accessible.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, I have a backup on an external hard drive. Thank goodness for backups!<\/p>\n
I decided that it was time to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. This time, I wanted mirrored drives with a file system that detects silent data corruption<\/a> 2<\/a>.<\/p>\n I started with btrfs, partitioned my first drive and installed Ubuntu. But wait? Should I have chosen ZFS?<\/p>\n ZFS<\/a> is a first class citizen in Ubuntu, and is reportedly rock solid. The documentation is good.<\/p>\n In contrast, it takes some searching to find good btrfs documentation, and some of the documentation refers to scary features that might eat your data — not comforting. Yet Facebook uses btrfs, so that’s good, right? On the other hand, they have people whose job it is to use it for the right use cases, and configure it appropriately. I don’t.<\/p>\n Oh, and there’s bcachefs<\/a>! It sounds great, and is reportedly faster, more modern than btrfs or ZFS, and more reliable that btrfs. Unfortunately, it’s not part of most Linux distributions yet, nor is it feature complete. I’ll look forward to using it in three to five years.<\/p>\n Ultimately, I chose btrfs because it doesn’t require that I dedicate the entire hard drive, and because I already had some momentum having started my install with it.<\/p>\n I found the following guide to be helpful to set up btrfs in mirrored mode: https:\/\/work-work.work\/blog\/2018\/12\/01\/ubuntu-1804-btrfs.html<\/a><\/p>\n Arch has good documentation for btrfs: https:\/\/wiki.archlinux.org\/index.php\/Btrfs<\/a><\/p>\n