What is BTRFS ?

Btrfs (B-tree file system, pronounced as “butter F S”, “better F S”,”b-tree F S”, or simply by spelling it out) is a file system based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle, initially designed at Oracle Corporation for use in Linux. The development of Btrfs began in 2007, and by August 2014, the file system’s on-disk format has been marked as stable.

Btrfs is intended to address the lack of pooling, snapshots, checksums, and integral multi-device spanning in Linux file systems. Chris Mason, the principal Btrfs author, has stated that its goal was “to let Linux scale for the storage that will be available. Scaling is not just about addressing the storage but also means being able to administer and to manage it with a clean interface that lets people see what’s being used and makes it more reliable.”