Hi, I want to do an “awesome things” list with BTRFS tools

Help me gather them?

General

BTRFS CLI Interface

btrfs-progs official userpace utilities

BTRFS Assistant

Tool for doing many BTRFS actions graphically

It requires snapper and offers a GUI for it.

butter-manager

Tool for managing snapshots, balancing filesystems and upgrading the system safetly.

Backups & Snapshots

btrbk

Backup utility using BTRFS

Snapper

General system snapshot utility with BTRFS support, used in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed by default. There are also plugins for Fedoras dnf and for Arch pacman.

Timeshift

System restore tool for Linux. Creates filesystem snapshots using rsync+hardlinks, or BTRFS snapshots. Supports scheduled snapshots, multiple backup levels, and exclude filters. Snapshots can be restored while system is running or from Live CD/USB.

Small CLI tools

dupreremove

Tools for deduplicating file systems

compsize

takes a list of files on a btrfs filesystem and measures used compression types and effective compression ratio

Used in flatpak-dedup-checker

btdu

sampling disk usage profiler for btrfs

For multiple reasons, classic disk usage analyzers such as ncdu cannot provide an accurate depiction of actual disk usage. (btrfs compression in particular is challenging to classic analyzers, and special tools must be used to query compressed usage.)

btrfs-list

Helps listing directories

Partition managers with support

  • kde-partitionamanger
  • gnome-disks?
  • blivet-gui (Fedora Anaconda setup) ?
  • gparted?

Data recovery

When having deleted or corrupted data on a BTRFS partition, these tools can help:

Testdisk?

  • photorec?

scalpel?

R-Linux

Freeware, not FOSS? Not related to R and “R-Studio” is also not related to RStudio

  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
    1·
    25 days ago

    I think BTRFS is especially problematic on Fedora Atomic desktops.

    Afaik the OSTree snapshots use BTRFS deduplication, also the zstd compression helps reduce storage usage and increase SSD use.

    But as the entire system partitions are read only, you cant balance, scrub etc them.

    This is a big issue I think, I will open a Fedora Discussion post about this.

    https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/119216

    • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
      2·
      25 days ago

      Afaik the OSTree snapshots use BTRFS deduplication […]

      Note: OSTree will transparently take advantage of some BTRFS features if deployed on it. [1]

      Interesting, I didn’t know OSTree takes advantage of BTRFS features.

      On my current system I use ext4 instead of btrfs which I regret specifically because of the missing transparent compression and reflink copy.

      [1] https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/

      • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
        1·
        24 days ago

        I also tried an install with LVM and F2FS instead of the default EXT4. It works, and F2FS is faster in theory, but I only found 2 bigger benchmarks. The older one said BTRFS is waaay slower, a newer one with exact reproducability details said it is equal.

        And yes I suppose that rpm-ostree utilizes the BTRFS CoW, deduplication and compression which all help reducing disk usage.

        But I dont know that.