When Chris Mason announced Btrfs (“Butter FS”) at Oracle in 2007, Linux fans cheered the promise: checksums, snapshotting, RAID, and all the ZFS goodies without licensing headaches. After years in “stable-ish” state, however, its appetite for random, thrilling corruption episodes kept it largely confined to hobbyists and the brave (or reckless). Years of incremental improvements later, Btrfs mostly behaves—mostly—but seasoned admins still eye it with deep suspicion, half-expecting it to happily consume terabytes of irreplaceable business documents at any moment.
