On Fri, 3 Jan 2014, Tim Cuthbertson <ratcheer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am a bit confused and I have probably managed to outsmart myself. > For about 15 months, I have been running my system on a single, large > btrfs volume. It is RAID-0 on two SATA-III HDD's for a total of 1.9 > TB. This is a home system running Siduction (Debian Sid) Linux. While > I have root, home, and a special data directory each as separate > subvolumes, I am beginning to wonder whether I should have made each > of these on separate partitions and separate btrfs filesystems. Why do you use RAID-0? > Am am at a point where I would like to do a fresh install of my OS > without losing my home and data contents. And I do not think separate > btrfs subvolumes will help me on that. Is that correct? Is there a way > to prevent an OS installation from formatting the /home and /data > subvolumes while completely replacing the root subvolume? Or do I need > to completely repartition my drives so I don't get into this > situation, again? A fairly standard OS install feature is to not run mkfs on a partition. So if you had your system configured such that the current root is a subvol and that the root of the BTRFS filesystem has no names that match a regular installation (IE not having /usr etc) then it should just work. Even if you use a /home subvol for the home directories that shouldn't be a real problem as the account creation process shouldn't remove old accounts. One other issue you may have is that you need the installer to have a new enough kernel to support the filesystem. If you install a system from a Debian/Wheezy CD and then upgrade it to Debian/Unstable then I think it gets some new filesystem features that make it impossible to mount with Debian/Wheezy. I recall having to upgrade a Debian/Wheezy system to a Debian/Unstable kernel so it could mount a BTRFS removable device that had been mounted on a Debian/Unstable system. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
