The sys admin’s daily grind – Converting to Btrfs

Btr's Better

Article from Issue 140/2012
Author(s):

Btrfs might not be complete, but conceptually, it combines so many useful filesystem functions that Charly couldn’t wait to play around with it.

My desktop machine uses an old ext4-formatted hard disk, which Linux mounts as /opt/data. This is where I build and try out software. Every few months, when the disk is full, I dump the content of /opt/data into the trash. Because I never store any important data here, I would survive the long-anticipated demise of this ancient hard disk without shedding a tear. Today, I’m going to try out the Btrfs filesystem conversion on this disk.

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