btrfs rescue changes your broken filestem. Anything could happen. Could be better, could be worse.
dd saves a point in time copy to a working place in case the rescue fails.
Ok, I see, I’ll drump the drive first then
Second rule of disaster recovery : don’t make it wose
I’ll probably be asleep before that finishes; good luck !
I’ve made the .dd file, it’s file size is significantly smaller than the original, but this is normal right? (It’s 2.8 GB while my btrfs partition is ~500 GB)
Nevermind, it’s still progressing, thank you for your help and your time!
If your hardware is working (not a given) the .dd file should be that same size as the physical partition.
Oh, edit: Yes. It may pause, espically if the hardware is ill.
You could check in /var/log for files like syslog or messages, or see whatever systemd has logged
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The process has finished, but I ran out of space on my external hard drive, is that an issue?
It’s really very useful, in its place. Its place is in a RAID1 (or maybe RAID5, RAID6, or some other level) array, where it has at least two copies of every file. The nightmares start when it only has a single copy of each file, and it detects a file that doesn’t match its checksum, because it won’t allow you – or the system itself – to access that file, period. If that file was a critical part of something, that something is just plain not happening. If it was part of the boot process… you get the idea.
Boot drives using non-checksummed filesystems will often degrade in a more gradual manner, giving you some warning when there’s a problem and allowing you to limp along until you have the time to reinstall the OS.
So I have to agree that BTRFS can be a nightmare on a boot drive, while appreciating it in its proper place.
'Fraid so. It means that you probably didn’t get the entire drive.
I think I’m just going to have to reinstall, but for future reference, during the fedora installation, is there a way to make it so that it uses ext4 instead of btrfs?
Sorry, I have almost no experience with Fedora. 
How much of a problem is it? At this point all I really need are my school notes, if they are on the portion of the drive that was copied over will I still be ok?
It’s okay, thanks for all your help. Honestly, this was a learning experience and even if my files are lost it’s not too bad.
That’s hard to say. BTRFS may need the part that didn’t copy over in order to access the part that did.
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Everyone has to learn the backup lesson the hard way. 
Sounds like you got off lightly, at least.
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Hello everyone, a final update.
I tried everything I could, even btrfs-check (and various other btrfs recovery methods) and none of them worked. Thankfully, I didn’t loose TOO much data, so I’m reinstalling my OS. Despite the data loss, I learned a lot about file systems and the importance of back ups.
Thanks everyone for your help and your time
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One last thing you can try is recovering some files with a couple of cli utilities called testdisk and photorec (they usually come in the same package from your distro’s repositories). I don’t know how much they support BTRFS but giving them a shot won’t hurt.
Just pointing out a filesystem doesn’t randomly murder it’s self. This most likely IS a hardware problem. Other possibility could be you ran a command that messed with the drive, but unlikely.
You listed the drive model others have been reporting to randomly drop out and crash their systems. This is the most likely hardware issue. Won’t matter which filesystem you choose.
Sorry to disagree, but in my experience, file systems can randomly murder themselves. Not often, but it’s happened to me several times, all some years ago now. I’m sure they weren’t really random, whatever actually caused them happened in the background, or long enough before the actual death that I can’t connect the two, but they were random as far as I could see.
Is that specifically the 500GB model, or any WD_BLACK SN850X? Also, could that just be that that’s the one Framework is offering, and therefore the one that most people are using with it, or is there evidence that it’s actually that model that has a problem? I haven’t run into those reports yet, and I’m concerned as I’ve purchased a larger one of those for my not-yet-delivered FW16.
I guess different experiences then. I have never had one randomly murder its self. If that was the case, then no one would use that filesystem. I’ve had many microsd cards fail when the controller failed but it was never the fault of the exfat or fat32 filesystem on the drives. In my over 10 years of using btrfs on all my machines I have had it fail twice. Once because the hdd was failing, another because I ran a buggy dedup script on it which hosed it. In all cases it wasn’t the filesystem that caused it.
Not sure. I don’t use any of those drives. You would have to do your own research and read up on the problems and do some tests yourself. I would suggest you read through the tracking thread on the issue to see if you might be part of that: [TRACKING] WD_BLACK SN850 sudden death - #10 by jrenken
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As I recall, mine were with ext3. As I said, they were quite a while ago.
Thank you for that link. Looks like it isn’t restricted to the 500GB model. 