I opened up Pamac today just to quickly see what updates there were available and I noticed I had a package called btrfs-progs installed. Now they only reason I’m really curious about it is because the file system that I installed for EndeavourOS is ext4. I just have one SSD in my laptop, I don’t have anything special for my setup btw. The only thing I can think of is if this package is installed in EndeavourOS by default or perhaps it was installed along when I installed Timeshift (it uses rsync or btrfs to make snapshots of your system for backups). Anyone else have this package explicitly installed to or am I the only one? I’m not alarmed that I have this package installed, I’m just simply curious as to why I have it installed. Also, I’m not sure if I should just leave it alone or if it needs to be removed or something. Appreciate any feedback as always!
Generally speaking, I think it is worthwhile having the tools installed for filesystem support. They take up very little space and allow you to access/create those filesystems if you ever need it.
@daab@dalto@joekamprad thanks for the explanations, that makes sense to me now as to why it’s there and I will just let it sit happily on my system from now on without a single worry!
Like I mentioned before I have ext4 as my file system, but I was thinking perhaps when the newest .iso is released and makes it easier/available to install btrfs as a file system in the installer, I think I may give that a go since I don’t really have any special requirements holding me back from the btrfs file system. Anyways, before I start rambling any more, just wanted to say thanks again for all the quick responses, y’all are super fast in this forum!!
Apropos btrfs-progs and the convert tool provided by this package, namely btfs-convert, I wondered if it preserves the data from the filesystem to be converted. The man page says:
NAME
btrfs-convert - convert from ext2/3/4 or reiserfs filesystem to btrfs in-place
SYNOPSIS
btrfs-convert [options]
DESCRIPTION
btrfs-convert is used to convert existing source filesystem image to a btrfs filesystem in-place. The original filesystem image is accessible in subvolume named like ext2_saved as file image.
Supported filesystems:
• ext2, ext3, ext4 — original feature, always built in
• reiserfs — since version 4.13, optionally built, requires libreiserfscore 3.6.27
Does:
The original filesystem image is accessible in subvolume named like ext2_saved as file image.
mean that the data from the converted filesystem will be preserved in a subvolume after the conversion?
Do I understand correctly that this means that you could mount the newly converted filesystem or rather the subvolume containing the image and access your data?
It creates a subvolume named ext2_saved. Inside that subvolume, is a single file named image.
The image contains the original ext4 filesystem(with the data) and can be mounted.
That being said, except as backup in case of failure, you shouldn’t need to mount that filesystem. All of your data will be in the new btrfs filesystem.
SIDE NOTE: Naming the subvolumes starting with @ isn’t a btrfs convention. It is a convention that came out of Ubuntu and has since been adopted by some other distros including opensuse.
@dalto I cannot understand one thing tho, you just run btrfs-convert on the partition you want to convert from the system or you have to do it from a live environment? Because I’m finding contrasting information on the web.
Me too, I am a bit confounded. While ArchWiki says to boot from a live medium the man page and BTRFS wiki clearly says that the conversion is done in place:
