Safely swap your filesystem to Btrfs

Btrfs is a filing system (see Roundup LXF283) that can be used as an alternative to the more commonly known ext4. You might think it’s risky to entrust all of your data to a relatively unknown filesystem, but in fact the Btrfs project was started in 2007, and it’s the default filesystem in some of the major distributions such as Fedora and SUSE Linux. So, it’s regarded as stable, and in fact, Btrfs has a lot of features that are designed to increase the safety of file storage. Having said all that, for all of the potential advantages, there isn’t anything extra that you have to learn for normal, day-to-day use.

Butter my FS

Why switch over to Btrfs? Well, unlike the ext4 filesystem, it uses ‘copy on write’ file storage, which opens up a number of intriguing possibilities. For instance, you can make a snapshot of your root filesystem, make some changes, decide you don’t like the results and then roll everything back to how it was originally. You could even make a massive change such as adding a different desktop environment and then back out of it later on. This might sound like snapshotting within a VM, and that’s because it offers the same freedom to experiment. You can also make snapshots of other subvolumes, such as the one containing your home directory, or you could apply snapshotting and rollbacks to server-related files.

You can also work with individual files and directories. Think of all of the times that you’ve had to work on a copy of a file while preserving the original