How a NAS with Btrfs Can Help Optimize Data Storage for Your Business

When it comes to large-scale data storage and transfer, businesses often require a storage solution that can minimalize data corruption while still providing flexible backup features. This is where the Btrfs file system comes into play. As a next-generation file system, Btrfs is a cutting-edge tool that offers many benefits for smooth, stable data transfers and storage. Storage devices that offer Btrfs allow businesses of any size to efficiently store their data while reducing risks of data and drive errors, lower storage costs, and higher data performance.

What Is Btrfs

Originally designed to address various data storage issues presented by the existing ext4 file system such as lackluster data protection, Btrfs is a modern file system that some unique benefits for data writing and management:

• More optimized drive storage space
• More consistent and streamlined data backups
• Improved snapshot functionality for effortless data protection and recovery
• Checksums are available for data and metadata

Efficient Data Storage and Flexibility

Btrfs is based on the copy-on-write (COW) principle. This essentially means that when a file is duplicated on Btrfs, it does not just create another copy of the file. Instead, a “phantom” copy file is created, essentially acting as a reference marker to the original file. Only when the original file is modified is a new copy of the file actually created and written onto the drive.

With Btrfs, entire shared folders can be easily and quickly copied this way. You can also set better storage limits for shared folders and enable quotas for better data management. Since a file isn’t actually created until it is modified, Btrfs also significantly reduces the overhead for each file’s metadata. This not only reduces the likelihood of data errors occurring amongst duplicate files, you can also manage the storage and performance of each drive more effectively.

Another benefit of Btrfs is that smaller files are packaged as the metadata itself. Along with native data compression algorithms inherent to the filesystem itself, data can be compressed at the filesystem-level just as it is written to the local system, providing unmatched storage efficiency.

One known aspect of Btrfs is that larger files can easily become fragmented, leading to impacted system performance. To mitigate this, Buffalo recommends frequent defragmentation to make sure system performance remains optimal. This is why Buffalo’s TeraStation 5020 NAS runs Btrfs, which enables it to present new data storage and backup solutions and features never possible before.

Increased Baseline Data Protection

Unlike many other existing filesystems, Btrfs supports checksums, which are small data blocks that act as “fingerprints” of a file. Checksums are used to compare files against, and are critical in allowing files to be checked for integrity and therefore reduce the chances of data corruption. Checksums are stored into the filesystem, with Btrfs continuously checking them to ensure file integrity, greatly reducing the chances of file corruption.

Speaking of metadata, Btrfs also manages it more carefully than other filesystems. Like checksum, metadata is critical to a file since it includes important file  information such as its location and access permissions. Like checksums, metadata is continually checked by Btrfs to make sure it remains intact, so that should a data error occur the odds of recovering a file based on its metadata are significantly higher. Btrfs stores two copies of metadata on a volume, allowing for data recovery if the hard drive is damaged or suffers from bad sectors.

Enhanced Snapshots

With traditional backup methods, significant time is often required to copy data from one location to another, which may lead to inconsistent data (and subsequent file errors) if something occurs during the copy process, such as if the files are modified. This is where snapshots come into play.

At its heart, a snapshot is essentially a copy of the system data at a given point in time—when needed, you can revert files and folders to the state they were at when the snapshot was created. This allows you to have granulated short-term data backup and recovery—you can restore single files or entire storage volumes—at near instantaneous speed. There is no worry about files being modified, moved, or deleted, and prepares you against everything from simple user errors to ransomware attacks.

Snapshots are extremely helpful in situations where you would need an instantaneous short-term backup, and especially shine when it comes to short term data backup and file versioning. Taking a snapshot consumes only a small amount of additional storage space and effects very little impact on system performance thanks to Btrfs's copy-on-write architecture. Buffalo’s new TeraStation 5020 series allows you to automatically schedule or manually create snapshot copies with timeframes as granulated as every five minutes, so you can always have snapshots on hand to help recover single files or entire storage volumes. Now work with peace of mind with snapshots to mitigate human error to even ransomware.

The Perfect Asset for Your Data Storage Environment

Even though Btrfs is relatively young when compared to the venerable ext4 file system, Btrfs can handle up to sixteen times the data that ext4 can, greatly benefitting businesses of any size. With improved data copying processes, increased checksums and metadata management, and optimized snapshots,  you can do more with your data storage and improve your business operations.

Our cutting-edge TeraStation 5020 offer Btrfs and snapshots, as well as other backup features such as replication that can greatly improve your backup strategy. You can schedule snapshots to be created at regular intervals so you can have peace of mind with your data protection. Contact us today to see how our data storage solutions can meet your backup goals and protect your data.