As you might remember, I wrote an entry on using the ZFS file system for my older network backup drive a while back, and how nice it was to have the protection of block checksums, ensuring that files can’t get silently corrupted. But for various reasons, I was forced to abandon ZFS on my new network storage system. I wasn’t too happy about that, and did some research on other file systems that included the block-checksum feature.

In short, there weren’t many, and the few that there were didn’t look stable enough that I’d trust them with anything of value. But in my research, I kept running across mentions of something called BTRFS (“Butter FS”).

It was hard to find much information on it, but what little I did find sounded very interesting. The good news: it has all of the features that make ZFS such an appealing choice (including block checksumming and several RAID levels), and unlike ZFS it was being built into the Linux kernel. The bad news: there are big capital-letter warnings that it’s still in testing, and that you can’t safely use it on production systems yet. Disappointing, but prudent.

Despite this, I’ve been following the news on it ever since, and today I discovered a recently-published article on it. If you find such things as interesting as I do, go read it.

I’m eager to try it out. As soon as the Linux gurus say that it’s mostly stable, anyway. 🙂