AllowDegraded should be on by default + questions

[CHerSun]

Hi. I'm a newcomer, so sorry if I overlooked something. Wasn't able to find documentation other then readme.

I'm looking for an alternative to hardware raid controller (LSI 9260-8i) with raid6. Mainly because it has 5x3TB drives, and now I can only buy 4TB+ drives - don't want to waste extra space and can't allow myself to replace all 5 drives at once.

So I was testing btrfs on windows VM with 5x20GB virtual drives. The most important thing is working redundancy, so I was testing that first.

On the VM I've created a btrfs volume. After that I've used GUI to add other 4 disks to the volume. Used balancing to convert data to raid6 and metadata+system to raid1c3. Everything was fine until here.

Next step - remove one of virtual drives from the VM. And here - the drive disappeared, already opened BTRFS tab reported wrong name. It would've been fine, if there was a CLI or some standalone UI to recover from that situation, but I wasn't able to find any other way to recover from that at all (well, that was a simulation, so I've just added the drive back).

So main proposal is to change default value for AllowDegraded to True (1) under HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\btrfs. This way user has access to btrfs tab GUI to check the state, start rebalancing, remove the drive / add new one, etc.

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Some questions, if any1 could help me:

• Is there a more extended documentation somewhere? It was a bit painful to even start this running (find mkbtrf, find btrfs tab under new volume properties in Explorer, etc).
• Can it show a notification on failed drive? I can see the drive as missing under show stats, but some kind of icon on the drive in This computer, or maybe a notification toast would be nice really.
• Is there a standalone CLI or GUI available?
• Is it possible to set timeout to rebalance data on drive failure, so that unattended server could recover parity before another drive fails at expense of free space?
• Is there any way to trigger btrfs replacement onto new drive?
• How to create read-only snapshots on schedule?
• What are valid values for CompressType ? How can I check compression effectiveness?
• Can I defragment the volume from WSL without rebooting to Linux?

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And finally, thank you for the project. It's amazing to be able to use btrfs on Windows directly. I'm using backblaze personal backup and it doesn't support Linux and network shares, so I really appreciate this possibility. Hopefully I can migrate.