Auteur Sujet: Playing with Btrfs  (Lu 2435 fois)

0 Membres et 1 Invité sur ce sujet

Hors ligne mimas

  • Général du Roi
  • Membre Complet
  • ***
  • Messages: 114
  • Jamais content
    • G+
Playing with Btrfs
« le: 14 mai 2013 à 12:36:21 »
I'm having fun with Btrfs, it 's a nice FS and it's got fancy features.

I won't explain it to you as some many sites have really good documentation about btrfs (i.e. http://www.funtoo.org/BTRFS_Fun). I will just introduce it. First, Btrfs is not a standard FS, it's a container. It can contains files, directories (like other standard fs as extX) but it can also contain sub-containers. These sub-containers are named subvolumes and they can be mounted individually.

What the need for subvolumes?

I wanted to install 2 distributions with their homes in a 100 GiB HD with an Windows already installed. Don't ask for Windows. I didn't want to waste more HD space with extra slices so I created a big Btrfs partition, plus a swap partition, and create 4 subvolumes (2 for the roots and 2 for the homes). And all subvolumes share the same disk space. No 5 GiB wasted here, 7 GiB wasted here, every free byte on the Btrfs partition is available for every subvolumes.

But it's not all. if I want to change something in a installed distribution and I'm not sure of the result, I can create a snapshot of the subvolume containing the distribution and restore it if my modification has gone wrong or boot on the snapshot.

A Btrfs parition can be composed of two or more HD (or another mass memory). Each drive can be dynamically mounted or unmounted.

I have not tested every possibility of Btrfs yet but i already like it.
When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.

Hors ligne melodie

  • Administrateur
  • Membre Héroïque
  • *****
  • Messages: 1774
    • Citrotux
Re : Playing with Btrfs
« Réponse #1 le: 17 mai 2013 à 17:05:55 »
Hi,
The page you link to gives a big warning about safety for one's data, they say the file system is not stable yet.

I am curious about the image creation : how long does it take to make one? Is is much longer if the partition (or slice) has lots of data? And when you restored a backup was it smooth and safe?

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.