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!
Copy on write is likely to introduce significant performance decreases in cases where large or medium size files have a couple bytes changed. It’s usually recommended to turn CoW off on those files; I found it to be more hassle than it’s worth for a root filesystem. It is still a reasonable file system for file storage that looks more like archival - files land there and seldomly or never change. If you don’t have a specific need in mind though, I wouldn’t bother - in my opinion, it’s not great as a general purpose filesystem.
Copy on write is likely to introduce significant performance decreases in cases where large or medium size files have a couple bytes changed. It’s usually recommended to turn CoW off on those files
Do you happen to have a source or benchmark for this? My understanding of CoW is that the size of the file does not matter, as BTRFS works with blocks and not files. When a block is changed, it’s written to a new location. All the old blocks that are not changed are not written again - this wouldn’t even make sense in the context of how BTRFS deduplicates blocks anyway.
So:
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10 kB base file
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modify 1kB of the content
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== 11kB total “used” space, and 1kB of new written blocks.
that old 1kB that is no longer part of the file will eventually be cleaned up if needed, but there’s no reason to delete it early.
Yes, a few examples of advantages here: https://lemmy.world/post/3197228
Yeah, I assumed something similar. Arch (may be endeavor also) is very much a la carte build your own system, so coyld be some tweaks needed. I found Leap and Tumbleweed have no issues with btrfs because its integral to the whole distro. My NVME use on desktop and laptop have been going steady for 7 years.
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.
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