Hi, I want to do an “awesome things” list with BTRFS tools

Help me gather them?

BTRFS CLI Interface

btrfs-progs official userpace utilities

BTRFS Assistant

Tool for doing many BTRFS actions graphically

btrbk

Backup utility using BTRFS

snapper

General system snapshot utility with BTRFS support, used in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

butter-manager

Tool for managing snapshots, balancing filesystems and upgrading the system safetly.

btrfs-list

Helps listing directories

Partition managers with support

  • kde-partitionamanger
  • gnome-disks?
  • blivet?
  • gparted?
  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
    0·
    5 months ago

    I never used BTRFS at all. At the moment I do not feel comfortable using BTRFS yet and wait until its proven over long time and ironed out even the weirdest edge cases.

    Edit: Don’t misunderstand me. I know its relative stable now, but reading here and there about the problems makes me very uncomfortable to switch from the battle tested EXT4. I really like its features and evaluated last year to use BTRFS as my system drive. Ultimately decided against it for now. I plan on using it, and clicked this post for this reason, to learn more about it.

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      5 months ago

      Maintaining btrfs is more work than maintaining ext4, which basically doesn’t need any. I.e. running btrfs scrub is important to keep performance up. Monthly scrubs are good because they don’t take as long if done regularly.

      Btrfs balance can free up some space, but otherwise isn’t important on SSDs.

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
        0·
        5 months ago

        I think BTRFS is especially problematic on Fedora Atomic desktops.

        Afaik the OSTree snapshots use BTRFS deduplication, also the zstd compression helps reduce storage usage and increase SSD use.

        But as the entire system partitions are read only, you cant balance, scrub etc them.

        This is a big issue I think, I will open a Fedora Discussion post about this.

        https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/119216

        • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          5 months ago

          Afaik the OSTree snapshots use BTRFS deduplication […]

          Note: OSTree will transparently take advantage of some BTRFS features if deployed on it. [1]

          Interesting, I didn’t know OSTree takes advantage of BTRFS features.

          On my current system I use ext4 instead of btrfs which I regret specifically because of the missing transparent compression and reflink copy.

          [1] https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/