Monday 11 May 2015

Installing & Recovering Ubuntu Server 14.04 using BTRFS

Our new servers are all running Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS.  This was chosen because it's free, it's fairly mainstream, and it's supported for security updates for 5 years between major releases (after which you can update in-place to a new major release).

An unexpected benefit of this system is that it supports BTRFS.  This was something new to me, but it turns out to offer a simple way to recover a system in the event of a disastrous update, and to recover lost files in the event of the user deleting them by mistake.