The sys admin’s daily grind – Converting to Btrfs

Btr's Better

Article from Issue 140/2012

Author(s): Charly Kühnast

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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