On 2017-02-26 18:04, Dr.-Ing. Dieter Jurzitza wrote:
Hello Carlos, I am quite astonished what a reaction has been triggered by my writing. To comment what Carlos has been saying: I usually have a partition setup with /boot, / and /home as separate partitions.
Well, having a separate /boot with btrfs breaks the snapshot feature. You no longer can boot a previous version. Yes, the reaction happens because there is no consensus.
Because / does not change significantly there is IMHO no real need for it to be that large, 50 GByte - 100 GByte should be more than sufficient.
If that is inappropriate with btrfs - well, I'd say again, then this fs is not appropriate for the things a normal user would do. In my mind 50 GByte - 100 GByte are more than enough for a root file system, where usually nothing happens but a little writing to and from /tmp and /var/tmp.
Well, if you want snapshots you have to give space for them. That alone is no reason to discard btrfs. Not having the disk space can be a reason to not using snapshots. I understand than below some size the feature is disabled. As I said, some people had their day saved by snapshots. It is a very nice feature. People that know very little about Linux, novices. In my opinion, you should dedicate triple the normal space to "/". 100 GB seems enough. Maybe I would use 200, knowing that I like to install many things.
"The music plays" in /home, what I'd make as big as possible. And, +1 for the comments of Carlos with regard to btrfsck - if using it breaks the file system, then it should nor be distributed neither installed.
Right. But fsck.btrfs is mandatory. If it breaks or breaks the filesystem, the tool should be repaired before setting btrfs as the default filesystem. Repairing a filesystem should be easy, so easy as not to need help from others (the computer is broken, maybe no access to help). There can be exceptions, but should be rare. Consider Windows. People have been able to run "checkdisk" since the origin of times. It runs on boot if needed and repairs the disk. Rarely people have to click somewhere. But yes, I have seen breakage in ntfs that the default tool failed to repair and I had to buy a third party tool. This is not Windows, but the ease of use and reliability of the repair tool should be similarly good at least.
A regular approach is to check a filesystem with XXXfsck, and it is the very responsibility of that tool to not destroy anything and to guide you through problems if problems are found.
Yes.
At the end of the das I would like to rise the question again: "btrfs has new and interesting features". Well, for whom? Am I offered a car with 5 rather than 4 wheels now? Does this help me getting better from location A to location B?
I really love the snapshot capability. I do. But I'm not prepared to pay for it. I am afraid of using btrfs. The fright wins. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" (Minas Tirith))