this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Why do you have a btrfs volume and an ext4 volume? I went btrfs and used sub volumes to split up my root and home but I’m not sure if that’s the best way to do it or not
Not OP, but I have the same setup.
I have BTRFS on /, which lives on an SSD and ext4 on an HDD, which is /home. BTRFS can do snapshots, which is very useful in case an update (or my own stupidity) bricks the systems. Meanwhile, /home is filled with junk like cache files, games, etc. which doesn't really make sense to snapshot, but that's, actually, secondary. Spinning rust is slow and BTRFS makes it even worse (at least on my hardware) which, in itself, is enough to avoid using it.
Have you tried to either
I have no direct comparison, but I can imagine that this could reduce the performance impact of your HDD.
I have a 120 gig SSD. The system takes up around 60 gigs + BTRFS snapshots and its overhead. A have around 15 gigs of wiggle room, on average. Trying to squeeze some /home stuff in there doesn't really seem that reasonable, to be honest.
I use btrfs for my
/
because I can use Linux Mint’s Timeshift tool to make snapshots, but I don’t want snapshots of/home
to be included. Am I doing this wrong?You can put your /home on a different BTRFS subvolume and exclude it from being snapshotted.
How about when I reinstall the OS? Will it only affect the
/
and not touch the/home
?As long as you don't re-format the partition. Not all installers are created equal, so it might be more complicated to re-install the OS without wiping the partition entirely. Or it might be just fine. I don't really install linux often enough to know that. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not sure if that’s wrong or not tbh, I use snapper instead of timeshift and I wanted /home included in the snapshots anyway (I think it let me set them up as 2 separate jobs). The reason I went with subvolumes instead of separate partitions is that I didn’t have to worry about sizing. I also know I can reinstall to my root subvolume without affecting the others, depending on the installer for your distro I don’t know how easy that is vs just having separate partitions. I played around with it in a VM for a while to see what the backup and restore process is like before I actually committed to anything!
Alright, thanks, I’ll try some experiments the next time I have the opportunity to do so.