BTRFS Filesystem

[jshand2020]

subvolumes are not patitions. you only need one partition for a msdos boot with the btrfs filesystem on it. you can have another partiton for swap and i recommend it.

opensuse is a great os, however, it is quite behind in regards to arch linux or even manjaro

[Easthee]

@jshand2020

ou only need one partition for a msdos boot with the btrfs filesystem on it. you can have another partiton for swap and i recommend it.

I prefer simplicity, so this is my BTRFS partitioning for this Manjaro:

A Boot partition and a Btrfs /root and /home in one (no swap file, no hibernation).

But unfortunately, on the today Suse I had like 10 volumes (not partition as you pointed out, thanks!). Thats what I have got from the installer, it wasnt my idea.

[jshand2020]

yeah manjaro is very simple to use and configure.

you must have about 16gb ram?? good setup

yeah those 9 or 10 volumes is opensuse’s recommended setup for btrfs.

[Aragorn]

@jshand2020

i have a normal HDD, so this might of been my problem, as it seemed to be balancing and scrubbing quite often. this lead to system lockup

Um, you guys do inspect the mount options in your /etc/fstab after installing, right?

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@Easthee

A Boot partition and a Btrfs /root and /home in one (no swap file, no hibernation).

Please do note ─ and you’re not the only one making that mistake ─ that /root is the root user’s home directory, not the root directory, /.

[Easthee]

@jshand2020

yeah manjaro is very simple to use and configure.

Totally! A few weeks ago I was on my decades old WinOS and bfore I landed here on Manjaro i installed like 15 distros including Arc, Debian, CentOS, many buntus etc and I think Manjaro was pretty much the easiest to install+config with non free drivers and kernel etc.

@jshand2020

you must have about 16gb ram?? good setup

Yes 16GB and I dont do video work to worry bec of swap. Evden if the system would crash dead by out of RAm, than I will just click on a BTRFS snapshot to backup and in 100ms the system is back in game…

@jshand2020

yeah those 9 or 10 volumes is opensuse’s recommended setup for btrfs.

What is the reason for, advantage of that…? Seriously. I a noob is aksing the pros. If it is not worth it than I will reinstall that laptop for my mom again…

[jshand2020]

i do check the fstab once i finish the install. unfortunately the kde full installer doesn’t offer to create the required btrfs volumes. you have to do it yourself. unless this has been updated recently

[Easthee]

@jshand2020

unfortunately the kde full installer doesn’t offer to create the required btrfs volumes. you have to do it yourself. unless this has been updated recently

It does not offer Btfr auto partitioning. I installed from that KDE iso just 24h ago too. It is why I have a single Btrfs volume and nothing else. I am a win user. You see, there is one single OS, so there is one single volume. Period Okay, and a boot.

[Easthee]

@Aragorn

Um, you guys do inspect the mount options in your /etc/fstab after installing, right?

Not really. As a noob I edited it once following some stranger’s commands on the net, before one of my reinstall

Here is mine, I checked it now:

Summary

This text will be hidden

/etc/fstab: static file system information.

Use ‘blkid’ to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may

be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if

disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).

UUID=7576-59AB /boot/efi vfat umask=0077 0 2
UUID=cf4c01eb-7117-4d41-ba2a-6d4e44ba60a4 / btrfs subvol=@,defaults,noatime,space_cache 0 1
UUID=cf4c01eb-7117-4d41-ba2a-6d4e44ba60a4 /home btrfs subvol=@home,defaults,noatime,space_cache 0 2
/dev/disk/by-label/BACKUP /mnt/BACKUP auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show,x-gvfs-name=BACKUP 0 0

[jshand2020]

yes, it is. however, I only use the free drivers

very interesting problem in regards to out of ram. very weird indeed. have you set sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1? to set that permanently in the /etc/sysctl.d folder the file 99-swappiness.conf with the setting vm.swappiness=1

you know what. i have no idea what advantage it has at the moment either. however, i read somewhere that a volume is like a folder you store data in

[jshand2020]

yeah it seems to only automatically partition a ext4 filesystem for you. you have to manually do everything in manual partition, which fails

[Easthee]

@jshand2020

you set sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1? to set that permanently in the /etc/sysctl.d folder the file 99-swappiness.conf with the setting vm.swappiness=1

No I did not set that. I have seen that one the net but some pros said that it is not really advised on SSD and/or with plenty of RAM without swap or somethign liek that. I have leartn that it is betetr not to mess to much with the system when it runs butter smooth and snappy like Manjaro I have tried many other distros these weeks where you would definitely need like dozens of tweaks just to feel them running okayish…

[Easthee]

I have made a FAT boot you can see, on EFI boot and GPT… I guess I messed up right? It works perfectly, anyway,… so i do not complain. System is faster than my Win10 was…

[jshand2020]

nope you didn’t mess up at all. you just prepared your system for large disk drives larger than 2tb

[visone]

Hi!
I converted my machine to btrfs a couple months back while I was writing this

[HowTo] Btrfs and Snapper

Difficulty: ★★★☆☆ How-To BTRFS and SNAPSHOTS for N@@bs Install system in BTRFS format on a sdd disk Partitions boot: File System: FAT32 Mount point: /boot/efi Size: 512M Partition flags: EFI, BOOT root: File System: BTRFS Mount point: / Size: 48GB for normal user, 64GB for power user Mount options: noatime,sdd,clear_cache,commit=120,compress=zstd,subvolid=256 home: File System: BTRFS Mount point: /home Size: 64GB for small user, 128GB for power user, the rest of your disk -10…

1. I’ve 3 volumes, root, home , snapshots and grub-btrfs.
2. I’ve try snapper(cli/gui) and timeshift.
   2.1 Timeshift is easier but more basic, snapper is more complete but more difficult.
3. I notice my system a little bit slower but it’s normal, ext4 is faster than btrfs.
4. My system doesn’t lost any performance with time.

About btrfs as default

1. I don’t think that’s a good idea.
   1.1 A lot of noobs still having problems with the partition process, if you add them volumes,subvolumes… Wow!!! that could blow their minds and the forum…
2. Still have some issues, I wouldn’t recommended for production machines if you don’t know what you’re doing.

[Chrysostomus]

I was working on making btrfs a single checkbox automatic option in calamares, but my computer broke and I’ve been waiting for a new one before continuing.

This that need implementation:

• better subvolume layout to exclude pkgcache and other low value data from snapshots
• automatic maintenance services so users don’t run out of space because they didn’t know to balance their volumes
• warning system and easy recovery tools if user runs out of space
• automatic setup of timeshift-autosnap and grub-btrfs
• checkbox to enable all this in calamares

[gustavo]

I would love to see btrfs receiving more attention on Manjaro. Its features, particularly snapshots, are too powerful not to receive prime attention. And with credible distributions such as Suse and now Fedora defaulting to it, in my view this is an are where Manjaro seems to be falling behind.

I have defaulted to Manjaro as my primary distro as I find its core principles practically unbeatable in the desktop Linux world, but I have found its btrfs implementation to be unreliable as my system kept hanging periodically for long stretches each time. Ended up having to format into ext4 and snapshot with timeshift in rsync. Not ideal, but stable.

[gustavo]

Hi. How has this hourly snapshotting setup been working for you? Stable?

I had that for a while on my i7 with SSD, but after around 100 snapshots, I suffered some data corruption problems on the snapshots themselves. Running a timeshift checking command ended up erasing most snapshots and from that point onwards it was a horror story that only got solved when I gave up on brtfs and reverted to ext4 on Manjaro.

[Aragorn]

@gustavo

Hi. How has this hourly snapshotting setup been working for you? Stable?

I’m afraid he won’t be replying to you anymore, @gustavo. He has told us a few days ago that he’s gone back to using Microsoft Windows, and that he won’t be coming back to the forum anymore.

[gustavo]

Thanks for letting me know. Too bad. No snapshots on Windows…

[Avinash]

I’m using BTRFS and snapshots for quiet sometime, i have not faced any issues till now. I take snapshot at boot and keep 5.