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...