BTRFS, you must use it inmediatly!

[bester69]

I gave the step, and migrate to btrfs filesystem to try how it was, I can say i didnt notice downgrade performance as for IO speed, and i won the wonderfull features of snapshots. Its really pretty cool and amazing to be able to restore my /home or my / to any time point.

->> BTRFS is the real backintime machine,

Im very surprise how quick snapshots are deleted or created and how good Snapper automatize the tasks of snapshots.

Im suppose Now i can do everithing with my system without any risk, its very easy once you understand how it works.


Best thing i did since i use Linux is use btrfs.

Here, a Guide pylkko wrote about BTRFS incremental backups
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=130512

[bw123]

ok i'll try it thanks

[pcalvert]

I don't use BTRFS because it hasn't matured enough yet for my tastes, but if I did I wouldn't use it for my data partition, and I wouldn't keep any important data in /home. For my data partition I would use ext4 or ext3.

Phil

[Head_on_a_Stick]

Yes indeed, btrfs is great fun -- I like to use subvolumes to hold many different distributions in a single partition with the full space being available to all systems, it's like magic compared to traditional multi-booting

[anticapitalista]

Is it worthwhile using BTRFS on low-powered boxes with lets say 1GB RAM?

[pylkko]

Is it worthwhile using BTRFS on low-powered boxes with lets say 1GB RAM?

People use it on Raspberry pi's so I don't see why not. Actually it might even make more sense given that in such a situation the bottle neck will likely not bee the fs (since with fast hardware you might suffer from some basically insignificant amount of i/o overhead).

On old BIOS machines you can sometimes (it apparently depends on how buggy the BIOS is) install on a single btrfs drive. That is, no other partitions, no partition table and nothing. However, you wont be able to use swap. If you need swap or some other fs type, then the most sensible thing is to make that and one btrfs partition and then divide the btrfs into subvolumes. If you want to use snapshots, it makes sense to put often changing files of little importance /proc maybe /var and such in their own subvolumes so that they can be excluded from shanshots.

I also wrote this "guide" on how to make offsite (usb drive) backups in addition to having automatic snapshots.

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=130512

This will be a more sensible thing to do with Debian 9 since so many improvements (autobalance and whatnot) have been added recently.

Also, I hear that XFS is getting cow and snapshot functionality.

For data, it is also possible to combine the functionality of btrfs with the reliability of ext4 by working on projects (so that you can rollback in them and use autohealing RAID1 in btrfs while developing, but store ready projects in ext4, for example (or automatically mirror with rsync from btrfs RAID to ext4).

[bester69]

Yes indeed, btrfs is great fun -- I like to use subvolumes to hold many different distributions in a single partition with the full space being available to all systems, it's like magic compared to traditional multi-booting

Hey, Thats great idea , I hadnt thought about that.., So we dont need to make parititions again, we can use subvolumes

[edbarx]

BTRFS may be great, but in my case, is entirely unnecessary. Ext4 does the job very well while using as many partitions under GPT as I wish. The time when I used many installations on the same computer looks like is over. Other than having a very minimal installation to manage GRUB*, another for making backups and another for use, there is no point in having more. However, this depends whether one is trying or testing distributions on the same computer.

With this HP Probook 4540s UEFI powered computer I had to use UEFI boot instead of Legacy Boot so that I could use a GPT formatted disk. Rather than BTRFS, my wish is more like using some bootloader that works on my system without having to install an entire base system. I was suggested various bootloaders which often lacked features that I need like the ability to read files under GPT with ext4 partitions. Having to move kernels to a FAT32 formatted partition, the EFI System Partition, is messy that results in broken installations if the EFI partition is corrupted or somehow damaged. It also fragments an installation by necessitating kernels to be saved under FAT32.