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The chunk tree of a btrfs filesystem corrupted and I could not recreate it after hour-long reconstruction. As a last resort (besides restoring from backup) I could use btrfs restore -S -x -m -v to get all the files back.

Does anyone know whether the restore is a best-effort way of accessing the data and corruption might be expected or is it reliable and all files that were saved can be assumed healthy - at least when no warnings or errors were reported? I could restore from backup but this would be very time consuming.

Are you storing file checksums and file permissions on disk as a safety measure for your archive storage in case you need recovery?

Reiner Rottmann
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As read from the man page:

The btrfs restore utility is a non-destructive method for **attempting** to recover data from an unmountable filesystem

So I would definitely put it in the "last-straw" category. As such, I do not expect for it to made any guarantee on the consistency/integrity of recovered files (even if it seems to work quite well for people using it).

shodanshok
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