I'm still not sure I understand what "balance" really does. I've run it quite a few times, with increasing percentage limits as recommended, but my drives never end up with equal amounts of data. Maybe that's because I've got an oddball configuration involving drives of two different sizes and (temporarily at least) an odd number of drives. It *sounds* like it ought to do what you describe, but what I read sounds more like an internal defragmentation operation on data and metadata storage areas. Is it both? On Fri, May 1, 2020 at 9:48 PM Paul Jones <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Delete seems to work like a balance. I've had a totally unbalanced raid 1 array and after removing a single almost full drive all the remaining drives are magically 50% full, down from 90% and up from 10%. It's a bit stressful when there is a missing disk as you can only delete a missing disk, not replace it. > It would be nice if BTRFS had some more smarts so it knows when to "balance" data, and when to simply "move/copy" a single copy of data. > > > Paul.
