Translations:Btrfs/5/en
From Gentoo Wiki
- Copy on Write (CoW) and snapshotting - Make incremental backups painless even from a "hot" filesystem or virtual machine (VM).
- File level checksums - Metadata for each file includes a checksum that is used to detect and repair errors.
- Compression - Files may be compressed and decompressed on the fly, which speeds up read performance.
- Auto defragmentation - The filesystems are tuned by a background thread while they are in use.
- Subvolumes - Filesystems can share a single pool of space instead of being put into their own partitions.
- RAID - Btrfs does its own RAID implementations so LVM or mdadm are not required in to have RAID. Currently RAID 0, 1 and 10 are supported; RAID 5 and 6 are considered unstable.
- Partitions are optional - While Btrfs can work with partitions, it has the potential to use raw devices (/dev/<device>) directly.
- Data deduplication - There is limited data deduplication support; however, deduplication will eventually become a standard feature in Btrfs. This enables Btrfs to save space by comparing files via binary diffs.
- Quotas - Btrfs offers quota support, which allows for grouping of subvolumes in quotas.