Modernize your Linux Storage with btrfs!

When it comes to filesystems, btrfs is definitely a bird of another color! In this video, Jay from Learn Linux TV will break down some of the finer-points of this modern filesystem, which will include topics such as how it differs from other technologies, how to take snapshots, creating a btrfs volume of your own, and more!
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Time Codes
00:00 - Intro
01:18 - Get your own cloud Linux server with Linode ➜ learnlinux.link/akamai
02:30 - Overview of btrfs, and some of its history (presentation)
05:34 - Pros and cons of btrfs (presentation)
11:54 - My thoughts on the stability of btrfs
13:27 - Overview of the btrfs implementation in Fedora 36
21:08 - How do partitions differ from btrfs subvolumes?
23:56 - Using the btrfs usespace utility to check filesystem usage
25:42 - How quotas can (hypothetically) privide a subvolume size boundary
27:46 - Demonstration of snapshots in btrfs
34:40 - Walkthrough: anually building your own btrfs implementation
39:58 - Walkthrough: Creating a btrfs subvolume
41:46 - How to (correctly) check the free space of a btrfs volume
42:17 - Another demonstration of btrfs snapshots
Video Specific Links
- btrfs feature status ➜ btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.p...
- Check out Chris Titus btrfs video, it's really good! ➜ • BTRFS Guide | The Best...
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#Linux #LearnLinux #btrfs

[@duser]

Please do make more videos on btrfs! especially on things like snapper, best practices, tricks with the file system that may be useful.

[@LampJustin]

As to best practices go RAID 1 or 10 or Single if you don't need raid. If you can duplicate your metadata 3 times (RAID1(0)c3) Do a srub every month or two, doesn't need to be often and after that do a btrfs balance. That's pretty much all. Tips: Use reflink copies whenever possible (cp --reflink always) It will create copy without physically copying the data. Only the new metadata will be created, similar to sym/hard links. It just doesn't come with any of the drawbacks. It's like dedpulication and can be used like that. ;)

[@duser]

@@LampJustin Thank you! I heard about reflinks but never really have an application for them at the moment. Oh and that raid setup 100%!

[@LampJustin]

@@duser yeah it's really useful for dealing with VMs, cloning them with that flag is pretty nice and safes not only time but space as well. Good thing is that latest gnutils set the --reflink auto by default. So whenever you copy stuff it will get reflinked. Nautilus on Gnome also does the same

[@sexualsmile]

kzbin.infoPF77M2V0UYs?feature=share

[@daveymac722]

Bro, I’m a little high right now so my sense of time is a little warped and it makes me pay much closer attention to your voice tones, and let me tell you… you have gotten a shit load better my brother. Much props on the high quality effort on the script and prep work you did. You really took the time to explain nuance. I have bookmarked this to rewatch while not high lol

[@toast1797]

I can't believe you released a video about btrfs at the exact moment I wanted to know more about it!

[@logyross6883]

lol same, I literally searched it yesterday

[@techboy007Bond]

I can't believe it's not butter

[@rahilarious]

same... I am planning to migrate my ext4 gentoo to btrfs since a while but been lazy to research bout btrfs. but now Jay solved it

[@tactileslut]

Mmm, toast. Now with butter!

[@pierrecassidy583]

I'd certainly love to see more btrfs content. Thanks for all the great work!

[@LearnLinuxTV]

I’ll consider doing more

[@paulthompson1988]

As usual, a very well researched and well-presented video from you. Good balanced overview of BTRFS, with the pros and cons, and where to looks for updates on that. It is great that a modern file system is being actively developed, and glad you highlighted it. Thanks Jay.

[@superspectator123]

Great video! Thank you! And yes, I would like to see more advanced concepts of btrfs in future videos.

[@HaroldPearson]

Thoroughly enjoyed this video. Thanks for making content like this, Jay. I would love to see more content on the advanced features of btrfs.

[@smoetje]

My Synology is using BTRFS for about 4 years now in a SHR raid. Its working like a charm and even disk replacement and raid rebuild, went flawless. Stable, stellar performance and deduplication is an awesome feature.

[@mlongval]

Excellent video Jay. Thank you very much. I have looked at BTRFS for a while, but never dove into it. Going to try it in a VM tonight. Please more videos on the subject. Also have you done videos on "backup best practices?" I would very much enjoy watching that. Thanks and Cheers from Canada!

[@TheRealFaceyNeck]

This video helped me understand BTRFS better. Great work! ...also Snapper is great. I set it up following a different KZbin video. It's awesome for people who want snapshots to be automated. It's in the RPM repos. (I'm also using Fedora.)

[@michalisfotiadis4966]

My top btrfs configuration options on Arch: Create a subvolume at /home, /tmp, /var/log, /var/cache, /var/lib/flatpak, /var/lib/libvirt, /srv, /root, /opt, /usr/local and of course /.snapshots, also ideally you want to replace the root subvolume so I create another one and mount it at /. For mount options: noatime,compress=zstd,discard=async,space_cache=v2,ssd_spread. Disable CoW for /var/lib/libvirt for better performance. And most importantly, even if you take snapshots of your root subvolume, you won't be able to boot, so I have a pacman hook that triggers every time I upgrade my kernel, which runs rsync -a --delete /boot /.bootbackup. Small tip is to also delete the subvolid from fstab (it's not needed, subvol is enough) so you can easily restore a subvolume.

[@LampJustin]

Yeah good recommends! But for me those would be too many subvols to keep track of and snapshot. I just have @ @home and libvirt images of course. I really don't like the naming but that's what you need for Timeshift........ Also yes you really shouldn't use subvolids in fstab or anywhere. Just renaming the subvols to rollback is a must.

[@michalisfotiadis4966]

The most optimal defaults differ form usecase to usecase. However it would be nice for fedora to step up their btrfs game, as it comes by default, the current one is an extremely vanilla setup and definitely less than ideal.

[@xellaz]

Great video! I'm always interested in filesystems and ways how to manage it. It would be awesome to have a video on what are the optimal ways of managing a btrfs filesystems checking for errors, repairing, etc. I have btrfs on my main Linux machine and also on my NAS. I'm always on the lookout for best practices on how to secure my data.. especially when it comes to the filesystems I'm using which is btrfs. 😅

[@act.13.41]

I am all for more BTRFS videos. I have been learning a lot from your channel. Thank you sir.

[@Staniola]

Great content as always! Huge thank you 🙏

[@joseffistus3058]

A really good video about btrfs. btrfs is a great FS. I use it since 2012. Never had any problems with btrfs. N8ever used Raid5/6 - only the so called "RAID1". Maybe that is why I never run into any problems...) One of the best features is to do read only snapshots of our home directory and use them for making backups via send / receive to another btrfs device. (It took me some time to understand the construct of send / receive - but finally it works :)

[@mikes.9091]

Thank you for the information on BTRFS. I'm a new Linux user and i'm watching\learning as much as I can about all the various aspects of Linux.

[@ericfielding668]

Thanks - I learned a bunch We have BTRFS running on a Synology NAS but EXT3 / EXT4 / ZFS everywhere else. It was good to hear a bit on how BTRFS works.

[@andreadiaz2867]

This is really great and very helpful. Thank you for sharing.

[@tota_trader]

Very well presented. Thanks for your hard work.

[@macedoplinio]

The best tutorial I have ever seem!! Congratulations!!!!

[@electricflyer81]

Yes, please provide additional content on btrfs. Thanks!

[@LucS0042]

It's only really RAID 5/6 (stripping) that is not completely stable with BTRFS. Actually, it's implementation of RAID1 is one of the best things about BTRFS for desktop computers in my opinion. Having installed an OS on two disks using RAID0, I was able to on-the-fly, without rebooting, in a matter of seconds, switch to RAID1. Something even the mighty zfs can't do for now (changing vdev structure).

[@PeterKese]

This! RAID 0 and RAID 1 are perfectly fine and work even better than md-raid. It's just RAID 5/6 that are incomplete (although errors are extremely rare with proper use - similar guarantees as md-raid on Linux kernels prior to 4.4).

[@williamp6800]

If RAID 5/6 had never been released, the BTRFS story would be really simple: “It’s a very reliable, flexible, and full feature modern file system for the desktop, and and anywhere else you don’t need big pools of disks.” As a bit of a ZFS zealot, I have to say BTRFS is really good.

[@danbrown586]

"Something even the mighty zfs can't do for now (changing vdev structure)" Nonsense. ZFS can easily add/remove disks from stripes, and add mirrors to those disks--i.e., do exactly what you described that you did. But parity RAID vdevs can't (currently) be changed; that's been Coming Soon™ for a number of years.

[@LucS0042]

@@danbrown586 are you saying ZFS can take a two disk stripe vdev and convert it to mirror vdev on the fly and back to stripe?

[@danbrown586]

@@LucS0042 Well, there's no such thing as a "two disk stripe vdev"; that would be two single-disk vdevs striped together. But with that caveat, it seems a strange thing to want to do, but yes, ZFS can do it.

[@vegar1tube]

Love the content 👍🏼! Yes, kindly provide a refresh on BTRFS and it's applications such as for virtualization (proxmox,etc,.), improvements, practical uses and such. Apparently, some of the major tech giants use it in their environment and it's natively supported in the Linux kernel.

[@J.A.11]

Great video! I really like to see more videos about btrfs.

[@0eieiei]

Another banger. Thanks, Jay!

[@ironmanlifts]

Hey Jay, thanks for the video been waiting for this one since your chat about it on Lawrence Systems. I successfully installed arch today with btrfs, systemd boot, and luks. :D I was having problem with the kernel but once I downgraded to LTS everything was fine. I'm not too sure about the additonal flags in arch.conf for systemd-boot but it's working.

[@yadsarwat6325]

thanks for the great video, btu I am curious what is the difference between ZFS and Btrfs, which one do you prefer?

[@Knirin]

ZFS, Btrfs losses data if you use anything but single drive, mirror, or stripe mode.

[@ytuser13082011]

BTRFS is awesome and it's much lighter than ZFS. I worked as a storage engineer for ~7 years and that's what I've learned during tons of tests and implementations - you DON'T need ZFS and BTRFS is really highly usable these days.

[@Julian-sj5tr]

I used BTRFS for @, @home, and @data subvol. I do dual boot Ubuntu with windows. With BTRFS it can share file directly with WinBTRFS. My laptop small SSD can fit much of data with it's compression. Some game like DotA 2 compressed at almost 50% ratio. I install all my program at BTRFS, also set my fav folder like download, document to @data subvol. Data deduplication also work in Windows. That is very much better integration than old school ext4.

[@TheGeorey]

​@@Julian-sj5tr compressing Dota 2 doesn't hurt performance? (fps)

[@vishaltripathy3620]

@@TheGeoreyexactly my thought

[@FengLengshun]

I found btrfs due to Fedora and Garuda. I love how Garuda implemented snapper, was very helpful when I was more experimental and overall just give me peace of mind. With Steam recently supporting CoW, would it be worth it to have my game partition as btrfs?

[@gnul]

I write too long stuff. TL;DR: Yes. I use it now for few years for hundreds of games spanning over 3.5TB, btrfs just works. I use @games subvolume, mounted at /mnt/games. I use and recommend Steam flatpak, fully sandboxed (all access to my files revoked), gave access to /mnt/games:rw (read write permissions from flatpak), just works. And it can’t mess with my personal files at all. btrfs is the successor of ext4, it basically can do over 99% of what ext4 can do, but much more at same, little worse, or even better performance. Of course they are extremely different fs, but for end user, I can’t say anything other than it just works. When paired with ECC RAM. But if not having ECC RAM, the other fs suffer the same, but they don’t tell you. Btrfs on the other hand knows e.g. when your file integrity is broken. But btrfs trusts the CPU and the RAM, so it will tell you your disk is broken or that cosmic microwave background radiation hit your NAND cell and broke some data on the disk, it won’t tell you data read is correct, but the one in the RAM is faulty, it does not know that, it thinks errors detected are from the disk. It assumes your CPU and RAM do not lie. When using btrfs raid 1 or 10 (with data copy) it periodically checks file integrity automatically, cause it hashes or checksums each file (always, that’s how it detects errors), if it detects mismatch, it will automatically check the other disk and repair broken data automatically, cause it knows if something is broken, and in RAID 1 case has a fully functioning copy. So awesome for system and documents and so on. If you don’t care about games integrity you can just ignore that feature, but it is still a good fs. You can use snapshotting, e.g. when modding a game, when an update broke your game mods, you can then look into snapshot and restore stuff or whatever. Only limitation is your imagination. It is better than ext4, allows resizing, and whole lot more features, comparable to zfs,.. so of course it is a good option. It is also newer than zfs, in my view it is better than zfs, but it depends. E.g. BSD NAS should use zfs. But for desktop, or server, always btrfs. But still, ext4 is good filesystem as well, as well as xfs, they are good choice as well. For games it does not matter that much. I recommend for system and home, two NVMe SSD, e.g. Micron 7400 Pro with power loss protection, using dm-crypt / luks on them, on top of that btrfs (in RAID 1 fully copy mode), and ECC RAM. Then maybe unencrypted additional SSD, e.g. FireCuda 530, btrfs for games. ECC RAM is no bottleneck in gaming. I just ‚downgraded‘ speed, from 64kMiB 3.6GT/s cl16-19-19-19 to 128kMiB 3.2GT/s cl22-22-22 ECC RAM - literally no difference in FPS (I play at 4k). If you have stutter in CSGO, right click, properties, compatibility, choose Steam Linux Runtime, working in Flatpak as well, they made it compatible, sandboxing works with native performance.

[@jonathandawson3091]

Good video. I find it much much less confusing and error prone to use the subvolume name than subvolid in fstab, and that's what I would recommend. FWIW, timeshift also works seamlessly that way with no need to manually change fstab.

[@zachsandvik1867]

Top, Jay! Thanks for your explanation! :-)

[@nemonada3501]

Definitely want to see more about this topic.

[@minifig404]

Would love to learn more about what Fedora 36 does or doesn't do out of the box to protect your data. It's kinda important to know whether scrubbing and automatic snapshots are your responsibility or not.

[@patriark]

It would be awesome with a new btrfs where you advice on some efficient backup systems, how to interact with external drives, NAS and possibly even syncing across clients. Maybe one practice for server backup and one for desktop/laptop.

[@user-gt8ix9bi4l]

Спасибо за урок! Всё что нужно по btrfs. Не чего лишнего, только самое нужное. Отличное видео.

[@VJ-zm5xi]

Thank you for the video!

[@nicoladellino8124]

A very very nice video, TNX👏👏👏

[@criandoEdesenvolvendo]

Cheers from Beazil. Thank you for this useful video

[@neilbedwell7763]

As far as I could tell from every other source, the BTRFS 'raid likes' are all fine and commonly used as defaults EXCEPT for raid5/6 implementations. But please do look at multiple closer-to-official accounts of btrfs raid profiles

[@Knirin]

Anything other than pure RAID 1 or RAID 0 will eat data and will probably never be implemented correctly.

[@DjBloodsaw]

A lot of arch distros use BTRFS by default, that's how I found out about it. The snapshot feature has saved me from quite a few mishaps.

[@muddyexport5639]

Yes, please more BTRFS vids!

[@tal1962]

Excellent tutorial. I Would like to know more about the possibilities for more complex fs solutions implemented with btrfs. Thank you!

[@BuBa-hm9kk]

Thanks Sensei ! 25:23 if I understand correctly, you're saying that : "despite BTRFS subvolumes being stretchable, without its quotas feature, the system becomes unusable when every bit of subvolume freespace becomes redistributed/saturated (e.g because of a logfile out of control). And since as of 2024 the quotas feature is still not ready, BTRFS on LVM appears mandatory/convenient for : hot-resizing/hot-bay-expanding/hot-bay-removal/insertion in a LVM rig. BTRFS itself seems enough for partitioning/isolating into subvolumes, but without LVM, users have to know beforehands the allocated storage sizes." So now I wonder why I saw nobody on YT putting up a guide on such way of installing (e.g for a Debian install + switch to busybox in the process) : efi + boot + PV, then on PV, a LV for root and a LV for home at least. BTRFS with subvolumes on LV root, BTRFS or EXT4 for LV home. Snapper integration able to snapshot only few subs from LV root, as well as LV home. (Optionally, LUKS sandwiched on LVM and under BTRFS would be the cherry on the top. So far, only skai nyght made it this way on YT. But him and EF (both Arch guys) encrypt swap in a way that prevents hibernation, so unconvenient for nomad laptops...) Maybe I'm missing some content, i don't know, otherwise feel free to hand out the idea to Tom if you already scheduled bunch of other content already ! :)

[@mikel8190]

I've been using btrfs on Debian since bullseye was released and it's great. I have separate root, home, and snapshot subvolumes and can boot home and root snapshots with dmenu scripts.

[@NS-no1li]

I was wandering what happened BTRFS .. it in fact has been around for decades and every now and again it raises its head and comes to the fore front with new features. I remember it back in SMS days when I worked there.. where is was played around in UNIX on Solaris. I have always liked the BTRFS concept and idea of use and I an happy to see it once again come to the fore front as commercially viable filesystem. Thank you for your introduction and viewing. I personally would like to see more about it and where it is going currently.

[@CGA111]

Finally, someone who managed to explain subvolumes in a way even my feeble mind could comprehend.

[@LampJustin]

10:12 No you absolutely should use RAID with BTRFS, just not R5 or 6. RAID 1 and 10 are much superior to mdraid or hw raid. Just striped RAID setups suffer from write holes if you're not careful.

[@LampJustin]

@@squishy-tomato fair, but I just wanted make it clear that RAID1(0) is indeed stable and totally usable. I already have some corruption from time to time, because of a bad controller. BTRFS does it's job great and corrects those flipped bits just fine. And yes I should definitely swap the controller, but cannot right now...

[@musefirefox2420]

Is there any validity in btrfs reducing the lifespan of SSDs? Great video! Thanks

[@andreicostache5325]

yes, thank you for the great video. If it were up to me, I would kindly request a more in-depth look at the mentioned feature of btrfs to extend storage by adding multiple physical drives (e.g. you have your /home folder on a separate drive, as you should, but then you want to add a second drive also for the /home folder... how would that look like in terms of btrfs?) thanks, and awesome video

[@markjones2349]

I finally made it through this whole video after several attempts. I think I'm ready to make the switch and probably wont ever use any other advanced features for a desktop machine. I just was interested in using it on my Linux Mint desktop to have full drive compression with the simple fstab mount option for my NVME drive to squash down my steam library. Ark alone is 400GB on my drive and I did test btrfs out for a few minutes and it compressed down to 50% which is a huge saving of space. Like you said in the video I can use timeshift like I have already been but I will just tell it to use btrfs mode.

[@shaddow1dog]

btrfs goes back many years ago. It was first used as a file manager for an accounting package. It has had an up and down history. One of the issues was once you used one application with btrfs you can not use another app using btrfs. It was a very popular file system many years ago and has reinvented itself and it's popularity thanks to Linux.

[@MarkWatsonSMTX]

It sounds like btrfs is easier to implement that LVM. It would be nice to see a detailed comparison with use cases for both.

[@AndersJackson]

LVM is easier to implement then btrfs. It is probably easier to use btrfs, but LVM is easier to implement, and then you just add ordinary file systems on top of LVM. But btrfs is combination of LVM and a modern fs. But it is actually another implementation based on ZFS, which is better then btrfs, as it is older and design by people that actually knows how to run huge servers. That said, btrfs features are not bad, and a bit lighter then ZFS. So all features in btrfs is in ZFS, but not everything in ZFS is implemented in btrfs (like RAID etc).

[@wassim-akkari]

@@AndersJackson there is RAID in btrfs

[@angelvega2652]

LVM and btrfs are not for the same purpose. The first is a system for managing physical or logical volumes and disks but sencond is a file system. We can user btrfs in out LVM logical volumes.

[@wyfyj]

In love with the meme usage

[@JahidulIslam]

You can use blivet GUI tool to manage few operations of btrfs. It is handy when creating or deleting btrfs subvolume.

[@HamBands]

Good explanation BTRFS, but I am sticking with EXT4 and LVM. They do all that I need. The snapshot feature is interesting.

[@jensenjs]

First, sorry for my poor English, i'm slightly dyslectic... The only reason I still have 2 Windows computers, is a program called RollbackRx. I have heard/read about BTRFS, and wondered if the works the same way as Rollback Rx And your GREAT video, shows me, it is almost the same idea and same functions, though all from the terminal. Thanks for showing some of this functions. -------------------------- I have for several years used RollbackRx. for Windows I bought 5 Pro licenses years ago and over time updatet to new edtions. As I wrote I have only 2 Windows computers today, and Rollback are the main reason. But I have had an eye on BTRFS for some time, but has been unsecure, since the sometimes negative critics. With your video here, I can se that most of the reputation is mainly a userproblem. (no critics to BTRFS from me, it is complicated, but not impossible.)

[@teachonlywhatiseasy]

enjoyed the btrfs demonstration. fedora desktops default to btrfs. i had the server version defaulted to xfs

[@user-cx7ze6oi5y]

Thank you. Please create more content about btrfs.

[@LearnLinuxTV]

I hope to do exactly that :)

[@komptek]

Fantastic video. Please make a video on how to convert from existing ext4 install to a BTRFS instance. This would save so much time from reinstalling and configuring some linux systems. If that is possible!

[@PeterKese]

Check "man btrfs-convert" for documentation. It can convert an existing ext4 filesystem in-place into btrfs (without losing any data). If you decide that you didn't like btrfs, you can even roll-back to original ext4 (and get back the same contents of ext4, as it was before initial conversion) ... however rollback only works until you have run btrfs-balance for the first time. You should preferably make a backup and boot from USB stick, when doing the conversion.

[@gerardm2193]

Excellent ! Merci

[@user-mr3mf8lo7y]

Good one. Thanks,.

[@TO-ir2do]

Please do more Videos on fedora and btrfs. Especially Backup Techniques in Case everything including the boot drive fails, Best Practices using Deja dup or other Backup tools -thank you!

[@ierosgr]

At 10.25 you mention about instability of btrfs. Probably true (I ve read many articles about it being inconsistent - short of) but some companies like Terramaster (one came to my mind right now) are using btrfs by default for their Nas devices.

[@seths1997]

btrfs has been included in fedora for the last 23 releases (introduced with fedora 13 in 2010) but if you are still saying it isn't feature complete, i'll stay with ext4 a bit longer

[@nemonada3501]

I've use btrfs in the past without quotas and had absolutely no problems with it but I wasn't using quotas. I think in the future I am going to stick with ext4 until they get the quota system worked out, that's a feature I would like to use but not going to play with experimental stuff. The snapshot feature was awesome though.

[@melaniezette886]

I use it for years on my very old laptop. Very satisfied, snapshots are great. And you can do things you can't with other fs even we have to be carefull

[@melaniezette886]

Yes btrfs is not raid

[@trubadyr99]

I would elaborate more about the benefits, purpose, and compelling reasons why an average user might need to use BTRS. A person has to be motivated enough to use or even try it. Because managing it, especially without the possibility of using GUI, looks pretty complex to the average home user.

[@WildMidwest1]

He hinted GUI end use it when he mentioned TimeShift but he did not go into it. I agree with you that the average Linux beginner (myself for example) is not going to want to modify fstab files manually or run all these command lines.

[@melaniezette886]

I think Suse has developed a GUI.

[@EthanLR]

34:21 but going forward everytime you reboot you land back on that same snapshot. is the current state of the filesystem the snapshot, or is the filesystem now read-only?

[@Winnetou17]

Can I be THAT guy ? Why doesn't btrfs integrate with df and du ? Not having to learn a slew of new commands for each fs would be, oh, so neat. Also, how is performance, when using subvolumes and quotas and such ? Is it just a couple percent slower in heavy duty (big listings, logs writing, file retrievals by a server etc all at the same time) ? Or it's more than that ?

[@muddyexport5639]

Good info/vid! What about migrating an EXT4 to BTRFS? In-place utilities or copy/add/delete/adjust from one to the other. I guess the question might also be BRTRS to EXT4? Never seen that topic or topics addressed but I haven't researched to any extent -- link to existing process? I remember doing these file system changes on IBM propertary OS but I didn't operate in the Unix/Linux OS environment. Blown long 3 day holiday weekend process counting full backup, execution, backup to new file system schema.

[@MM3RTH]

My Synology NAS uses butter-fs. Keep telling us more Jay. Many thanks laird Bill.

[@jonathanrider4417]

I use both Linux Mint and Ubuntu - the improvements to Timeshift enable reliable backups - only criticism is inability to store in a remote location - I can move the archive after as a workaround. So I will continue with ext4 for now but thanks for this.

[@igorminaev7017]

Thank you, it's very useful! But for me (as a btrfs newbe) would be very important to see how to create subvolumes (the process of installation OS with btrfs). I'm still using ext4 ( because ,in my case, I know how to create ext4 partitions: / on SSD + /home on HDD ). In case with btrfs still can't understand it (

[@Cadambank]

This video tells about creating subvolume during installation. I don't know if this helps. kzbin.info/aero/PLwQD7rvZhbK-L6JlQwqOSP3DvMUmvbPvj

[@LampJustin]

Also don't forget about the usefulness of reflink copies! It will make a deduplicated copy of a file, meaning that it will only copy the metadata of the file and link the data to the already present blocks. If you modify normal CoW will kick in and copy only the modified data. This is why you can copy multi gig isos on Fedora (within a mountpoint) in microseconds. Try it out with Nautilus ;) This really helped me restore movies from snapshots that I had accidentally deleted. You just need to mount the root subvolume to keep the copy within a mountpoint.

[@NilsNormann]

Thanks!

[@magoostus]

so BTRFS raid1 and raid10 are stable, so the work-around we've been doing is to make *metadata* raid1 or raid1c3 and have the data as raid5 or raid6 which solved the potential corruption issue.

[@256shadesofgrey]

If I have btrfs on / and have a /home subvolume, does creating a snapshot of / also include a snapshot of /home? Or would I in that case need to create 2 separate snapshots, one for / and one for /home to be able to completely roll back my system to a previous state?

[@sykoteddy]

I've only watched half of the video but will continue tomorrow. I just wanned to thank you so much for making such in deepth videos for numbnuts like me. I don't know why I have such hard time grasping how Linux is built, but I wished I would have migrated to Linux from Windows a long time ago, then it probably would have been a lot easier. 🙏👌 I created my btrfs partitions while installing EndeavourOS but it seems like they are partitions and not subvolumes because my home partition and root doesn't share the same size. Can I reconfigure this afterwards or do I need to do it before I install EndeavourOS next time? I had devided a 960GB NVMe into 512mb fat32, 40Gb for / and the rest for home. Would be greatful if you give me a smallexplanation. Thx alot for a great Channel!

[@leonardorodoni]

Cool, right after I moved to fedora. Perfect timing😎

[@microcolonel]

Regarding btrfs RAID, the RAID1, RAID0, RAID1C3 (three copies), RAID1C4 (four copies), and RAID10 (mirror on stripe) configurations are all considered stable. The ones known to be unstable are the RAID5/6 strategies.

[@SebastianPerezG]

When fedora switches to btrfs from LVM ? it was a pain in the ass when you create a next next installation and they give you only 2gb for his root or system partition .

[@chaes1161]

Thanks for the vid as always. Pls mkvid about migrating existing ext4 root and home partition to btrfs.

[@George.Gadgets]

Question: if I have a btrfs partition (fedora 38 default) which includes / and /home as subvolumes, is a / snapshot supposed to include the /home data as snapshot? It is, if you make an snapshot of / and a snapshot of /home, aren't you duplicating the /home data snapshot? As a second question: is it smart to make a / (root) snapshot? If so, the snapshot will also contain the data in all the folders including folders from other filesystems like /boot? Thanks in advance.

[@uncrunch398]

I'm just curious how much space savings I can get switching from ext4 and using the tightest compression available. Still all good to learn if interested in this FS though.

[@ruimagro72]

Butter FS!!!!! Where is the Toasted Bread?????? Served with an FS on the side?

[@georgehope5477]

More btrfs content please!

[@franciscolastra]

Great video!!! Really helpfull! I am definitely going to give btrfs a try. Loved the sub-volume feature. Could you please update the btrfs feature status link. There is an frightening "OBSOLETE CONTENT" sign on top of the wiki page. 😨 Many Thanks!!!!!

[@petruspotgieter4561]

Are they still working on implementing the snapshot restore command? Seems a bit incomplete having to edit fstab file.

[@onditireagan6194]

Thanks for such a wonderful video on btrfs,have a problem with my proxmox server running btrfs, its generating an error when starting the server,how do one rescue the btrfs file system

[@notreallyme425]

10:30 you mention not using RAID with BTRFS. I have a Synology NAS using a BTRFS volume. Is that a RAID system using BTRFS vs BTRFS using RAID?

[@Royaleah]

I have ran btrfs on a raid1 style for a while. It had been reliable and easy to work with, but I have noticed increase and decrease in performance when I go to new kernels.

[@ardoren5442]

Great video! I would like to see an advanced video on how to create a full system backup & restore on Fedora 36, using btrfs/timeshift or snapper.

[@LampJustin]

To properly use Timeshift you need to install Fedora with the Rootsubvolume name of @ and the name of home as @home. Otherwise ts doesn't work. This can be done afterwards as well without any problems or recovery media. Mount the btrfs partition with the subvolid of 5 to mnt (mount -o subvolid=5 /dev/sda3 /mnt) Then go into that dir and move root to @ and home to @home. (cd /mnt; mv root @; mv home @home) Your running system won't even notice, check it out with mount (mount | grep " / ")! Now you'll need to change fstab to reflect the change as well. In particular just change the names from root and home to @ and @home. At last change your current active grub boot entry from subvol=root to subvol=@. Reboot and e voila, you did it. That's also how you would restore a snapshot on a running system, just without changing fstab and grub.

[@matthiasbendewald1803]

@@LampJustin what exactly doesn't work with "sane" names for my subvolumes? I have set it up with the default names as fedora uses them and Timeshift seemed to work. Or well, it didn't work well because I needed 4 subvolumes to be handled, therefore I switched to snapper

[@LampJustin]

@@matthiasbendewald1803 I am not sure what you're trying to say, but for whatever reason TimeShift only supports doing snapshots for the @ and @home subvolume. Fedora instead names to root volume root (-> @) and the home volume home (-> @home). That's why I renamed them like stated before. I Infact also have more subvols but as expected TimeShift will completely disregard them.

[@matthiasbendewald1803]

@@LampJustin okay then I must have mixed things up. Maybe I had used that rsync option in Timeshift? Whatever, thanks for the answer!

[@tambokavz]

Thankful

[@hojjat5000]

Looks like pop os 22.10 will switch to btrfs as default too. They're working on tools for creating and restoring snapshots.

[@Ruddy761]

I am installing a new ver of Fedora and am trying to decide if I want to use btrfs or stick to ext4. It will be a single disk graphics workstation (blender, gimp, etc), I ll be working with mostly large files. What you think?

[@yerrysherry135]

Some of my friends and colleagues use Btrfs. This is mainly on simple configurations, such as on laptops and they are happy with it. With regard to Raid 5 and Raid 6, it is clear that there are problems with that. The video even advises against using Raid. Search for the channel "2.5 admins" in youtube and listen to episode 3 (03: Apache’s Btr than you think) from minute 16:30. There are also other episodes about btrfs (episode 41, 58) I just check the Btrfs wiki of Debian and this is still the case. (the second warning of "Other Warnings") This makes me stick with ext4, xfs, ...

[@rafal9ck817]

29:00 Why not readonly snap? Then it's easier to just snap snap (btrfs sub snap -r org backup ; echo 'breaksystem' ; btrfs sub snap backup org).

[@maksimmuruev423]

So btrfs required linux kernel on separated ext4 partition? I've got all on btrfs..and belive this is the cause of the issues with attemp to restore from the snapshots.. but who knows.

[@Traumatree]

Btrfs WAS unstable hence the reputation it got and why no one wanted to use it. With ZFS around though, I don't really get why we would even use btrfs as the former has been tested and is production ready since the last decade, a thing btrfs can't claim yet. It is a nice project, but again re-inventing the wheel when there was a solution already (ZFS).

[@allanwolfe6071]

Some history. . . BTRFS was developed by Oracle (not RH)" before they purchased Sun Microsystems who developed ZFS for Solaris UNIX. Oracle was developing BTRFS to be a performant filesystem on their fork of Linux that would support an Oracle DB environment. BTRFS was always behind in terms of features and stability compared to ZFS of which has long been stable for 10-12 years. ZFS was introduced in Solaris 10. I figured after the Sun purchase, they'd adopt ZFS and ditch BTRFS. It looks like Oracle has given the BTRFS project over to be open-sourced under an Apache 2.0 license. When Oracle controlled the project, back when, it was under a pseudo proprietary license (best my memory serves me). While an astute administrator has a workable and tested backup and recovery plan, having a stable and performant filesystem is equally important. I would prefer to rely on ZFS as a part of that plan than to plan for when BTRFS will fail or slowly rot data (which usually goes unnoticed), especially in a virtualized environment. ZFS provides the ability to take snapshots and able to move pools from one host to another, though a bit clunky when compared to truly clustered filesystems for Linux (e.g. Ceph, Gluster).