You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.
I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.
I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?
Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.
Using Btrfs you can do some pretty cool snapshotting: It’s basically like system restore of Windows but MUCH faster and pretty seamless. Even if you annihilate the whole operating system you can restore the snapshot and voila, have fun! It also has compression which can save some wear on SSDs and of course give you some more free™ storage space, which is cool [actual benefits depend on workload*]
This is twelve years old, but it nicely illustrates what BTRFS (and ZFS on other OS) can do … https://youtu.be/9H7e6BcI5Fo?t=206
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/9H7e6BcI5Fo?t=206
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
ZFS also has snapshotting too FWIW.
ZFS has almost everything ever conceived for filesystems lol it’s a whole ass volume manager and filesystem into one
Do you know how I could split my default
/var/home/userinto/var/home/user/.var,/var/home/user/Torrentsand the rest?Think that would be great for use with btrbk, when I find out how to use that.
Damn BTRFS and btrbk need an easy GUI, I have the feeling its great for backups
There’s no GUI, but following the wiki pages on BTRFS subvolumes you should be able to make a subvolume for those with like 2 simple commands (take a look at the man page for BTRFS subvolumes as well)
I’m not sure what you want from your first question. Do you want like another mount point to the directory or something else?
Btrfs got Btrfs assistant if you want for GUI. Not a complete list of the tools, but good enough. I am still looking for a btrbk gui tool too… Or at least an interactive CLI.
As for Btrbk, I recommend doing a root and home subvolume. Then add a hook on your package manager to snapshot root on pre unpacking. Then you can also do some other subvolumes. I put my programming, VMs, and modeling stuff in their own subvolumes, with Btrbk set on on-change. This allows only snapshoting on demand, and can be a sort of version control (even more when you tend to break your VMs with dumb shit) I think it wouldn’t be that useful for torrents tho, as they mostly just sit there, and a regular full home backup is plenty enough