Setting up btrfs

wengole · 14 Jan 2015 at 05:40

I've been playing around in an Arch VM trying to setup and understand btrfs. Seems like it can do a lot of useful things like zfs but it's baked into the kernel and so makes sense using it for root drive.

I've found a few guides and read through the arch wiki page but I don't quite get why things are the way they are.

Like what's all this __ volumes? Why does it need the __ ?

wengole · 14 Jan 2015 at 05:55

I was working off this guide.

It seemed weird that there's the __ in front of everything, wasn't sure if that was required syntax or a setting which makes the subvolume do something.

Under the create a btrfs filesystem, it makes the __active and then under(?) that it makes the rootvol, home and var and says:

The reason for having rootvol on a dedicated subvolume is that it makes recovering from snapshots easier than if home and var were children of rootvol.

I don't understand why you'd do that?

wengole · 14 Jan 2015 at 06:04

I think I see. I'll keep going and see if that helps me understand. I presume also that the /mnt/defvol directory is just arbitrarily named too?

Thanks for the link I'll look at that guys blog posts and see what else there is.

wengole · 14 Jan 2015 at 06:09

Thanks. I'll have a read through and try it out later.

wengole · 16 Jan 2015 at 04:35

I got it all working and it makes more sense now.

I feel like there are loads of things btrfs can do, does anyone have good guides or practices for using it?

I have a snapshot of my clean system