Thanks Psalle. This is the kind of feedback I was looking for. I do realize that using a filesystem in a degraded mode is not the wisest thing to do. While I looked at git-annex I'm not sure it can help to solve bit-rot detection. Now I noticed that my current backup solution borg-backup also has a checksum verification feature so I can at least detect errors. In addition it provides incremental deduplicated backup so it should get me covered if I discover that something went wrong.
alphazo On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Psalle <psalleets...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello Alphazo, > > I am a mere btrfs user, but given the discussions I regularly see here about > difficulties with degraded filesystems I wouldn't rely on this (yet?) as a > regular work strategy, even if it's supposed to work. > > If you're familiar with git, perhaps git-annex could be an alternative. > > -Psalle. > > > On 04/01/16 18:00, Alphazo wrote: >> >> Hello, >> >> My picture library today lies on an external hard drive that I sync on >> a regular basis with a couple of servers and other external drives. >> I'm interested by the on-the-fly checksum brought by btrfs and would >> like to get your opinion on the following unusual use case that I have >> tested: >> - Create a btrfs with the two drives with RAID1 >> - When at home I can work with the two drives connected so I can enjoy >> the self-healing feature if a bit goes mad so I only backup perfect >> copies to my backup servers. >> - When not at home I only bring one external drive and manually mount >> it in degraded mode so I can continue working on my pictures while >> still having checksum error detection (but not correction). >> - When coming back home I can plug-back the seconde drive and initiate >> a scrub or balance to get the second drive duplicated. >> >> I have tested the above use case with a couple of USB flash drive and >> even used btrfs over dm-crypt partitions and it seemed to work fine >> but I wanted to get some advices from the community if this is really >> a bad practice that should not be used on the long run. Is there any >> limitation/risk to read/write to/from a degraded filesystem knowing it >> will be re-synced later? >> >> Thanks >> alphazo >> >> PS: I have also investigated the RAID1 on a single drive with two >> partitions but I cannot afford the half capacity resulting from that >> approach. >> -- >> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in >> the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org >> More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
