Case study: recovery of a corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool(github.com)
56 pointsby salt40346 hours ago5 comments
  • yjftsjthsd-h3 hours ago
    > This is not a bug report. [...] The goal is constructive, not a complaint.

    Er, I appreciate trying to be constructive, but in what possible situation is it not a bug that a power cycle can lose the pool? And if it's not technically a "bug" because BTRFS officially specifies that it can fail like that, why is that not in big bold text at the start of any docs on it? 'Cuz that's kind of a big deal for users to know.

    EDIT: From the longer write-up:

    > Initial damage. A hard power cycle interrupted a commit at generation 18958 to 18959. Both DUP copies of several metadata blocks were written with inconsistent parent and child generations.

    Did the author disable safety mechanisms for that to happen? I'm coming from being more familiar with ZFS, but I would have expected BTRFS to also use a CoW model where it wasn't possible to have multiple inconsistent metadata blocks in a way that didn't just revert you to the last fully-good commit. If it does that by default but there's a way to disable that protection in the name of improving performance, that would significantly change my view of this whole thing.

    • rincebrain2 hours ago
      As far as I can see, no, the author disabled nothing of the sort that he documented.

      I suspect that the author's intent is less "I do not view this as a bug" and more "I do not think it's useful to get into angry debates over whether something is a bug". I do not know whether this is a common thing on btrfs discussions, but I have certainly seen debates to that effect elsewhere.

      (My personal favorite remains "it's not a data loss bug if someone could technically theoretically write something to recover the data". Perhaps, technically, that's true, but if nobody is writing such a tool, nobody is going to care about the semantics there.)

      • yjftsjthsd-h2 hours ago
        > I suspect that the author's intent is less "I do not view this as a bug" and more "I do not think it's useful to get into angry debates over whether something is a bug".

        Agreed, and I appreciate the attempt to channel things into a productive conversation.

    • rcxdude26 minutes ago
      btrfs's reputation is not great in this regard.
    • Retr0id2 hours ago
      Unless I missed it the writeup never identifies a causal bug, only things that made recovery harder.
  • Retr0id2 hours ago
    This is obviously LLM output, but perhaps LLM output that corresponds to a real scenario. It's plausible that Claude was able to autonomously recover a corrupted fs, but I would not trust its "insights" by default. I'd love to see a btrfs dev's take on this!
    • number62 hours ago
      This is also my first impulse. The second was, if this happened to me, I would not be able to recover it. All the custom c tool talk... If you ask Claude Code it will code something up.

      Well that he recovered the disks is amazing in itself. I would have given up and just pulled a backup.

      However, I would like to see a Dev saying: why didn't you use the --<flag> which we created for this Usecase

    • yjftsjthsd-h2 hours ago
      I was assuming real scenario with heavy LLM help to recover. Would be nice for the author to clarify. And, separately, for BTRFS devs to weigh in, though I'd somewhat prefer to get some indication that it's real before spending their time.
    • nslsman hour ago
      An LLM wouldn't make a mistake like "One paragraph summary"
  • 2 hours ago
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  • stinkbeetle3 hours ago
    > Case study: recovery of a severely corrupted 12 TB multi-device pool, plus constructive gap analysis and reference tool set #1107

    Please don't be btrfs please don't be btrfs please don't be btrfs...

    • toaste_an hour ago
      I mean, the only other option was bcachefs, which might have been funny if this LLM-generated blogpost were written by the OpenClaw instance the developer has decided is sentient:

      https://www.reddit.com/r/bcachefs/comments/1rblll1/the_blog_...

      But no. It was btrfs.

      As a side note, it's somewhat impressive that an LLM agent was able to produce a suite of custom tools that were apparently successfully used to recover some data from a corrupted btrfs array, even ad-hoc.

      • yjftsjthsd-han hour ago
        It could be ZFS. I'd be much more surprised, but it can still have bugs.
        • praseodyman hour ago
          ZFS on Linux has had many bugs over the years, notably with ZFS-native encryption and especially sending/receiving encrypted volumes. Another issue is that using swap on ZFS is still guaranteed to hang the kernel in low memory scenarios, because ZFS needs to allocate memory to write to swap.
          • badgersnake23 minutes ago
            The zero copy that zero copied unencrypted blocks onto encrypted file systems was genius. It’s almost like they don’t test.
  • phoronixrly3 hours ago
    To theal author: did you continue using btrfs after this ordeal? An FS that will not eat (all) your data upon a hard powercycle only at the cost of 14 custom C tools is a hard pass from me no matter how many distros try to push it down my throat as 'production-ready'...

    Also, impressive work!

    • fpoling3 minutes ago
      What are the alternatives to btrfs? At 12 TB data checksums are a must unless the data tolerate bit-rot. And if one wants to stick with the official kernel without out-of-tree modules, btrfs is the only choice.