This right here is what has made it so flexible for me to reuse salvaged equipment. You can just chuck a bunch of randomly sized drives at it, and it will give you as much storage as it can while guaranteeing you can lose any one drive. Fantastic.

Schedule a monthly scrub (with the foreground option), and make sure you get notified if the exit code is non-zero

https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-scrub.html

I also have a weekly balance scheduled to keep block groups compact, although if you don't frequently delete files this may not be necessary IMO

I’m not sure I know enough to be giving out advice, but I can tell you what I do. I do have a cron job to run scrub, to keep the bitrot away. I also tend to replace my drives proactively when they get REALLY old — the flexibility of btrfs raid1 lets me do that one drive at a time instead of two, making it much more affordable. You can plan out your storage with the btrfs calculator.

Btrfs does get a lot of flak based on hearsay or experiences that are out of date. It works well in a lot of scenarios and is used a lot now, ZFS is also a good fs for many use cases, especially in enterprise situations.

I can't comment on the on-disk formats as I have no experience there but Btrfs works well in a lot of use cases for for a lot of users.

Bcachefs sounds promising but it does have a long way to go and will need a lot of testing. It's getting into the kernel to get more testing mileage on it and encourage more developers, it only have one guy working on it (except for the casefolding submission) which is a big problem for both present and future. Hopefully it'll get more devs interested.

Never trust any filesystem, or the storage media. Consider anything that holds your data to be fallible.

Why just :1? The default is :3 and looking at the timings for zstd deflate speed vs compression level (Google for it .. ), becomes slow at around 7.

Don't mean shit to me but suggest you reconsider.

For a software RAID like this, you don’t want a hardware RAID controller, per se – you just want a bunch of ports. After my recent controller failure, I decided to try one of these. It’s slick as hell, sitting close to the motherboard, and seems rock solid so far. We’ll see!