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help with setting up btrfs

Linux Kernel, Network, and Services configuration.
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cTurtle98
Posts: 2
Joined: 2016-11-16 05:47
Location: Santa Cruz, CA, USA

help with setting up btrfs

#1 Post by cTurtle98 »

I have googled around and I cant find anything so maybe i dont know the correct terminology.

I have my debian 9 server with emby installed on it, I bought 2 1tb hard drives for emby and formatted them with ext4

I have discovered btrfs and am wondering if there is a way to convert my 2 1tb drives to btrfs and make them one volume without loosing any data

is btrfs the best way to do this?

if you have any recommendations on a different way to do this that would be appreciated as well

as soon as I get the money I want to buy some 8tb hard drives and make a network share I can set my windows computers to back up to and im trying to find the best filesystem to do that.
I want to be able to buy the 8tb drives one at a time as I have the money and have the volume expand to do parity across however many drives I have and maximize usable storage
im not sure if btrfs is right for this, I have no clue how to do this

thanks for any advice you can give me

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Head_on_a_Stick
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Re: help with setting up btrfs

#2 Post by Head_on_a_Stick »

cTurtle98 wrote:I bought 2 1tb hard drives for emby and formatted them with ext4

I have discovered btrfs and am wondering if there is a way to convert my 2 1tb drives to btrfs and make them one volume without loosing any data
I would strongly recommend that you *do not* attempt to convert your ext4 filesystem to btrfs, I lost my first Arch box to a botched conversion :cry:

The btrfs wiki even has an emboldened warning about it:
Warning: As of 4.0 kernels this feature is not often used or well tested anymore, and there have been some reports that the conversion doesn't work reliably. Feel free to try it out, but make sure you have backups.
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php ... _from_Ext3

Although I use btrfs myself I would actually advise against it's use with a Debian stable server because the rapid pace of development requires that the newest kernel version possible be used for maximum reliability.

It is probably also worth noting that RHEL have recently dropped btrfs support in favour of XFS & LVM, perhaps you should look at that instead.
deadbang

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pylkko
Posts: 1802
Joined: 2014-11-06 19:02

Re: help with setting up btrfs

#3 Post by pylkko »

Even though RHEL has moved away from btrfs, I believe that many massive operations that write terabytes of data per second still use btrfs (like Facebook). Correct me if I am in the wrong, but I believe the RHEL 7 will be using XFS and I believe I read somewhere that XFS has been attempting to bring in all the COW-type features that btrfs has.

For your original question, I believe that if you want to form one logical volume over two disks, then you can also use LVM.


EDIT: yeah, actually:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke ... 8010284082

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