In my experience, btrfs is very fragile in power loss or kernel crash/panic scenarios. It very consistently causes soft lockups on file read/writes after power loss until you run a `brtfs check --repair` on it. My experience is mostly on Arch, so it's not a case where it's out of date and missing patches.
Sounds like hardware problems in the storage stack. Btrfs developers contributed the dm-log-writes target to the kernel, expressly for conducting power loss tests on file systems. All the file systems benefit from this work.
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/device-mapper/log-w...
And Btrfs is doing the right thing these days.
I recently conducted system resource starvation tests where a compile process spun off enough threads to soak the system to the point it becomes unresponsive. I did over 100 forced power off tests while the Btrfs file system was being written to as part of that compile. Zero complaints: not on mount, not on scrubs, not with btrfs check, and not any while in normal operation following those power offs.
If you want to complain about Btrfs, complain about the man page warning to not use --repair without advice from a developer. You did know about that warning, right?
That's an inadequate answer because it rests on other file systems assuming the hardware is working reliably. Btrfs and ZFS don't make such assumptions, that's why everything is checksummed. They are canaries for hardware, firmware, and software problems in the storage stack that other filesystems ignore.
This was my experience. We had a brief power outage at work and my btrfs (root) partition was toast. Spent a whole day rebuilding my system afterwards. Will definitely not go that route again.
The only difference is that none of the repair tools were able to recover the filesystem, but I was able to dump the files themselves to a new disk to recover them. Really not sure why, it was very strange.
Ugh. You are testing your home the Netflix way [1] :-)
Why not putting poweroff in a cron task a bit before midnight so you don't uselessly risk hosing your file system? You can always restore your backup but it takes time!
