On 8/31/26 04:14, Richard Bostrom wrote:
Dear sirs and ladies!
What filesystem is best suited for safe file storage on OpenBSD?
Are there any options like ZFS, or Btrfs, please? Thank you.
Yours truly
Richardh Bostrom
definitions of "safe" vary. What is yours?
I don't consider btrfs "safe", and ZFS has some cute features, but the
complexity (and experience) makes me very wary. For some applications,
it is probably the best. But it is about as anti-OpenBSD philosophy as
you can get -- it isn't a "just works" kinda thing. That generally
means you lose data for "other reasons" (such as admin error).
In OpenBSD, though, the answer is going to be the default, FFS2.
Unlike certain other projects, all developers use the same file system,
bugs are found and fixed. It is simple, time proven, and it works.
There are some basic things you can do to keep your FFS2 file system
a bit "safer" -- a big one is separating writable space from read-only
space, and keeping the read-only space mounted, well, read-only. When
you need to update the data, remount RW, update, remount RO.
I've recently become a big believer periodically checking the disk
operation by reading every sector on the disk:
dd if=/dev/rsd0c of=/dev/null bs=1m
I found one of my machines had developed bad spots on rarely (never?)
used old files, found this test found the errors. I then applied this
test to other machines I ran and found one other totally unknown bad
spot on a disk (hiding away in swap, so unlikely to ever cause a problem
as this machine never swaps...but still good to learn about!).
And...of course, backups.
Nick.
