I don’t understand it very well myself but have been using the standard btrfs install on EOS and i never have any issues with updating and i use grub.
There’s a bug with steam and btrfs subvolumes that bit me when I wanted to put steam on a different btrfs subvolume to exclude it from snapshots.
Also personally I prefer btrfs on my backup disks too, so I can scrub them for errors.
Why so many “Sub volumes” AKA Partitions? If you have your root and /home folders on a separate partitions, all of the users files, and nearly all settings for both the OS and all programs will be retained if you reinstall the OS, as long as you tell the installer to mount it as/home. Or if in a multi user system each user can have their own drive or partition, and you can mount as /home/USERNAME, and the installer will put list them in fstab. I have only wiped my home folder twice in 10 years, just to remove unneeded junk, and never had to go through the process of setting anything back up. In those cases I just restored all of my own documents, music, pictures…from a backup I made prior to reinstalling the OS.
I can see making a separate partition for games, if you have a lot and they take up a lot of space, and I have like 6 drives in my main PC for different things of which I have a lot of, like music, videos, my business separate from my private stuff… But not things like logs, cache, the Firefox profile… that’s just not necessary, and Downloads should never be large, unless you never move the files to more suitable locations.
subvolumes are very different than partitions. If you think of them like partitions you will not come up with the ideal solution.
Creating lots of partitions would be a pain. It was common once upon a time many years ago to do this. However, it creates a lot of space management and disk organization issues.
Subvolumes suffer from none of those problems. So more of them only gives you more flexibility down the road. For example, you can create different snapshot policies for each subvolume and you can easily move subvolumes around between filesystems even. You can use them as part of a highly efficient backup strategy or in many other ways.
Btrfs isn’t for everyone, but if you choose to use it, you might as well make use of the flexibility of subvolumes.
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That’s only with BTRFS, you don’t have snapshots in exe4 and other file systems. Making partitions is easy as pie with gparted. Sounds like setting up sub-volumes and different policies… isn’t any easier.
Right. But we are specifically talking about btrfs in this case.
The questions are: a) Do you use snapshots? and b) How sure are you that you stay with that one OS only?
If you use snapshots you probably don’t want Downloads, cache, logs, trash etc. in those. Depending on your use case there may be GB of data moving through them on a daily basis and that adds up quickly in the snapshots.
I also have a separate “myHome” subvolume which only includes my files (mainly the default home folders like Documents, Pictures, Music, firefox-profile etc). - I assume that dalto mounts them individually having them split into subvolumes; I just symlink them from the one subvolume. Every actual OS installation has its own “home” subvolume and they can store all the files of that particular installation (.config, .local etc) in there. With that you can even run completely different distros and DEs from the same drive which is a crapfest trying to do from a single home folder.
So you gain a lot of flexibility with such a setup. It’s a different question if you need or want it.
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He did mention an ext4 backup drive.
I’m looking for a great solution. I’ve always used ext4 for backups. They are too tried and true not to imo. It’s worked for a very long time and will continue to.
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As far as you know.
There could be dozens of flipped bits and unreadable files in your backup, but your file system is unable to detect and report them.
Right now!
DOZENS!
I think it is easier, actually. Making partitions with gparted may be easy, but to make a new subvolume with Btrfs you just run a command–no need to resize the neighboring filesystems first, or boot to live media so you can manipulate a partition while it is not mounted, etc.
With Btrfs, you can add a whole new installation next to the existing one in another subvolume, without any partitions or resizing anything at all. If you want /home from your old installation, or some files out of /etc or something just mount that subvolume and grab it. You can remove the old installation at your leisure simply by deleting the subvolume when it is no longer needed.
Dalto, I am curious to hear what you mean by this. Do you mean that symlinks do not provide additional benefit in comparison to just properly configuring subvolumes, or are symlinks on Btrfs problematic in some way?
The former. Symlinks work fine but, for the purpose stated above, subvols make a lot more sense and add more value.
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I’ve never thought about a btrfs backup. Since generally the files or folders I actually backup in a worthwhile manner I just drag and drop.
The media drive can be btrfs though. The slow big back up will be ext4 without question though.
I think I’m just going to go with a one drive install and make my second nvme a media drive that I need to manually move things into so that way I’m forced to organize as I go.
The HDD is just photo backups.
Anything in production will still be on the main drive.
But the project kicks off tomorrow!
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I only have one comment. If you aren’t doing btrfs then what are you doing? 
Umm. What?
It’s just a joke. Like Nike… just do it! 
It’s like Will Farrell’s big red commercial in Talladega Nights
Better mount that m.2 drive down. 
First time I’ve seen an m.2 wifi card. I usually get pci-e wifi cards so that’s cool! Is that port specific only to wifi card or can it be used for either or?