I’m having trouble understanding all the benefits of BTRFS and how they’ll apply to me.
Copy on Write and auto-compression seem like they will free up a bit of space.
What other practical benefits will I see from using BTRFS? Are there any noticeable performance benefits?
I use my computer to dual-boot. I don’t need snapshots because I have a custom script for a fresh install. I use my PC for gaming and work. I’ve got an NVMe, two SSD’s and one HDD.
Thanks in advance!
Transparent compression, snapshots, copy-on-write, deduplication, and data checksumming (and healing via read or scrub) are the main things you might notice as an end-user. BTRFS is mostly on par or slightly slower than other simpler filesystems for speed (can be faster on HDDs due to compression), so if you’re using it you probably want to be taking advantage of the features it offers, not because it’s going to be faster.
As a (semi) power user I also use btrfs subvolumes to create “partitions” (single disk system, @root, @home, @docker), allows for making snapshots only for system or user data, etc.
All around, I love btrfs and I am never going back to journaling fs like ext4
Copy on Write and auto-compression seem like they will free up a bit of space.
That benefit is more theoretical, than practical. The majority of content you have on your drive will be content that is already heavily compressed at the file format level (e.g. images, movies, music) and where additional compression has no effect. So don’t expect any big savings out of the box, you get about 5-15% saving on a regular install.
The real benefit are in the additional functionality it provides, e.g. you can use copy-on-write to make backups of large games before trying to mod them, backups that you might have previously avoided due to 100GB copies taking so long, with BTRFS it is done in a second.
As for BTRFS snapshots you seem to have the wrong idea what they are for. With them you can create backups of your whole filesystem within a second, so you can have full backup in case something goes wrong. With the snapper daemon you can easily automate that make new snapshots every hour and expire them when no longer needed. That’s a really useful thing to have and with BTRFS it’s basically free.
Another big advantage is the ease of partitioning, or the lack of a need for it, with BTRFS subvolumes all your volumes can share the same free space, while still being addressable as separate file systems, e.g. you can have subvolumes for / and /home, without having to guestimate how much space you might need in the future. Can also be abused to install multiple distributions on the same filesystem.
Also checksums, BTRFS will tell you when your data goes bad.
I thought compression would not help much with disk space as well. I believe it depends on the use case. After switching to btrfs and enabling zstd compression, my Arch install reduced from 100GB to 60 GB in terms of used disk space. Most of the savings are from documentations of development packages.
Just for reference
spoiler
~> compsize -x /
Processed 699693 files, 766975 regular extents (791577 refs), 360356 inline.
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 57% 39G 68G 69G
none 100% 23G 23G 23G
zstd 35% 15G 44G 45G
prealloc 100% 69M 69M 104M
~> compsize -x /var/lib/flatpak
Processed 340412 files, 115619 regular extents (256345 refs), 209687 inline.
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 55% 6.7G 12G 24G
none 100% 3.6G 3.6G 6.6G
zstd 36% 3.1G 8.5G 18G
~> compsize -x /home/user/.local/share/Steam
Processed 219633 files, 1097250 regular extents (1111566 refs), 57457 inline.
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 84% 249G 295G 296G
none 100% 203G 203G 203G
zstd 50% 46G 91G 92G
prealloc 100% 36M 36M 36M
~> compsize -x /home/user/.local/share/bottles
Processed 18582 files, 33406 regular extents (33406 refs), 2366 inline.
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 53% 1.8G 3.3G 3.3G
none 100% 959M 959M 959M
zstd 36% 907M 2.4G 2.4G
So it’s 29G(43%) from / + /home, 5.3G(45%) from flatpak packages, 46G(16%) from Steam, 1.5G(47%) from Bottles, ~82G total out of 380G(22%) which is nice
If you don’t think you want snapshotting then dont worry too much about it and use whatever fs you like. if you want a nice btrfs experience try tumbleweed or leap, it is already fully integrated with system and grub , and maintenance with cleanup etc. cobbling together btrfs on your own is fine too but if you miss sometging and mess things up it is usually user error not btrfs error. .
For me, snapshots are the best part of BTRFS because you can easily roll back bad updates without doing a fresh install. It might not be worth reinstalling for, but there’s no reason not to on your next install.
I know it’s all in my head, but there’s something about a fresh install that gives me comfort.
I do a fresh install every few months when something starts behaving funky and it’s normally faster than figuring out what’s wrong.
Snapshots just don’t have the same appeal to me lol
You do a fresh install every couple months? Damn. I’m using the same install from like… 7 years ago? Which was also 3 laptops ago. I just keep copying the install partitions from one laptop drive to the next.
There is definitely something rewarding to figuring out an issue and fixing it, vs starting from scratch every time. Also, you realistically shouldn’t be having serious issues every few months, unless you’re running a rolling distro like arch and there’s issues with packages. I do think a bit of that might be in your head,or you’re experiencing some weird hardware issues/failure.
