I use btrfs on all the machines I manage. I once ran into issues during an unclean shutdown while running a scrub - I needed to mount with the recovery option and I did not lose any data. All in all I find it a very, very useful filesystem due to it's features. The most useful probably being checksumming and send/receive. I suggest you give it a try. You even can convert from ext4 to btrfs (and back to the state you had when you converted from ext4 to btrfs).

You do not need separate partitions for / and /home, if you create subvolumes for them. I employ the following scheme:

• Create btrfs filesystem on your block device
• Mount it to /mnt/target
• Create subvolume /mnt/target/@ (for /): btrfs subvolume create /mnt/target/@
• Create subvolume /mnt/target/@home (for /home) - the @ prefix is useful for distinguishing subvolumes from regular directories - you can omit it or choose something else, if you prefer.

• Use something similar to the following code to add your subvolumes to fstab. Please note the subvol= parameter. You can mount a specific subvolume (and every subvolume that is contained within the subvolume) instead of the whole filesystem with all of it's subvolumes.

  UUID=xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxx / btrfs defaults,ssd,noatime,subvol=@ 0 1 UUID=xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxx /home btrfs defaults,ssd,noatime,subvol=@home 0 2

• Unmount /mnt/target

You can use kickstart (at least on centOS 7) to create a btrfs volume, subvolumes and inclusion into fstab during installation by modifying the following snippet. It also allows putting /boot onto the same btrfs filesystem. A thing that the graphical installer will not allow you to do:

# Disk partitioning information
part btrfs.141 --fstype="btrfs" --ondisk=vda --size=10239
part swap --fstype="swap" --ondisk=vdb --size=2047
btrfs none --label=machinename_root --data=single --metadata=single btrfs.141
btrfs /     --subvol --name="@" machinename_root
btrfs /boot --subvol --name="@boot" machinename_root
btrfs /home --subvol --name="@home" machinename_root

If you mount the same filesystem to /btr without a subvol= parameter you can easily store snapshots outside of your subvolumes:

UUID=xxxxx-xxxxx-xxxx  /btr/disk0               btrfs   defaults,ssd,noatime     0       0
UUID=xxxxx-xxxxx-yyyy  /btr/disk1               btrfs   defaults,ssd,noatime     0       0

If you use btrfs-backup, use something like this in a cron job, to create snapshots of your subvolumes and transfer them to a backup disk:

btrfs-backup.py --latest-only --snapshot-folder /btr/disk0 --snapshot-prefix @ /btr/disk0/@ /btr/disk1
btrfs-backup.py --latest-only --snapshot-folder /btr/disk0 --snapshot-prefix @boot /btr/disk0/@boot /btr/disk1
btrfs-backup.py --latest-only --snapshot-folder /btr/disk0 --snapshot-prefix @home /btr/disk0/@home /btr/disk1

Oh, on a sidenote: You can tunnel send/receive through ssh and so keep you backups on another machine.

Cheers!