Hello all!
I am currently running a raid10 array with mdadm for my data storage which I intend to switch over to a Btrfs raid 1 configuration on 2 larger new disks.
After spending the last two nights reading and trying a few things in a VM there are still open questions that I cannot seem to find the answers for. The more I research, the more confusing it all gets .
The goal:
On the new storage Iâd want a large shared space for the following items (slightly simplified):
- âWorkâ - we want snapshots for this
- âProjectsâ - also want independent snapshots for this
- âMediaâ - no snapshots needed
I tried creating my 3 subvolumes with each being a root volume like so:
sdb
|
|- work
|- projects
|- media
However, when I do this, and mount the subvolumes, the drive listed under âdevicesâ in dolphin somehow links to the work subvolume so something seems off.
Do I need to create a root subvolume and then create subvolumes for work, projects and media underneath it?
sdb
| /
|- /@work
|- /@projects
|- /@media
If this were the correct layout, should the root subvolume be mounted in addition to my work, projects and media subvolumes?
Does it make sense to turn on btrfs compression on the media subvolume where we are already dealing with heavily compressed files?
According to the btrfs wiki:
btrfs filesystems can be created on:
- partitions (example: /dev/sdb1)
- raw disks, without partitioning (example: /dev/sdb)
What are the benefits/potential drawbacks of using partitions vs. raw disk?
When researching I am finding confliciting information where some people say that a partition should always be created first while others claim to be running directly on raw disk fine for many years.
Next, I would like to use Snapper for snapshotting using configurations for âworkâ and âprojectsâ.
Am I correct that snapper will place the snapshots like so and that rollback will be possible, or does this require subvolumes for the snapshots themselves?
sdb
| /
|- /@work
|- -.snapshots
|- /@projects
|- - .snapshots
|- /@media
Currently I run daily system backups of my ext4 system with Timeshift rsync with the destination of the raid10 ext4 array.
Will this still work if the destination were a âsys-backupsâ btrfs subvolume?
After the moving of data to btrfs is done, I plan on recycling 2 of the current raid10 disks to store extra copies of the work and projects data which is about 250GB (offsite backup is already taken care of). What would be a clever and easy way of doing this? Btrfs send/receive? Rsync?
Thank you for your help!
Beer