"BTRFS, then, is much more aggressive than ext4 with regard to data storage. It has been designed to subsume some of the features that are normally done by logical volume managers (LVM) and RAID hardware, does checksums for both its internal metadata and user data, and has built-in support for snapshots (like an LVM). Several of these features can be done with ext4, but require interacting with both the file system and the logical volume manager.
"Interestingly, BTRFS was initially developed by Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) — which is acquiring Sun — but is now licensed under the GPL and is thoroughly in the open source community, open for contribution from anyone. It is described on its own project pages as "a new copy on write file system for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.""
