Thinking that btrfs should approach a stable status by now, I used it as file system for the backups on my primary test server. Well, it works well and is really fast. Compression seems to work, too.
But there was a unexpected warning during one backup. It could not create a hard link. In this case UrBackup logs a warning and copies the file.
I checked the inode number of the file that failed to link and it was hard linked nonetheless – weird: Btrfs claimed it could not hard link even though it already did it. There were also only about 500 links to that inode. I checked the file system limit for the number of hard links and discovered that btrfs supports as few as 31 hard links to the same inode in one directory.
There is a relatively new patch to raise this limitation http://lwn.net/Articles/498226/, but it has not landed in the kernel yet. This issue does not affect UrBackup that much, but nonetheless, it shows us something about the stability of btrfs.
Thus my advise: Don’t use it yet.