On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 4:28 AM, Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 2015-08-04 00:58, John Ettedgui wrote: >> >> On Mon, Aug 3, 2015 at 8:01 PM, Qu Wenruo <quwenruo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> >>> Although the best practice is staying away from such converted fs, either >>> using pure, newly created btrfs, or convert back to ext* before any >>> balance. >>> >> Unfortunately I don't have enough hard drive space to do a clean >> btrfs, so my only way to use btrfs for that partition was a >> conversion. > > If you could get your hands on a decent sized flash drive (32G or more), you > could do an incremental conversion offline. The steps would look something > like this: > > 1. Boot the system into a LiveCD or something similar that doesn't need to > run from your regular root partition (SystemRescueCD would be my personal > recommendation, although if you go that way, make sure to boot the > alternative kernel, as it's a lot newer then the standard ones). > 2. Plug in the flash drive, format it as BTRFS. > 3. Mount both your old partition and the flash drive somewhere. > 4. Start copying files from the old partition to the flash drive. > 5. When you hit ENOSPC on the flash drive, unmount the old partition, shrink > it down to the minimum size possible, and create a new partition in the free > space produced by doing so. > 6. Add the new partition to the BTRFS filesystem on the flash drive. > 7. Repeat steps 4-6 until you have copied everything. > 8. Wipe the old partition, and add it to the BTRFS filesystem. > 9. Run a full balance on the new BTRFS filesystem. > 10. Delete the partition from step 5 that is closest to the old partition > (via btrfs device delete), then resize the old partition to fill the space > that the deleted partition took up. > 11. Repeat steps 9-10 until the only remaining partitions in the new BTRFS > filesystem are the old one and the flash drive. > 12. Delete the flash drive from the BTRFS filesystem. > > This takes some time and coordination, but it does work reliably as long as > you are careful (I've done it before on multiple systems). > > I suppose I could do that even without the flash as I have some free space anyway, but moving Tbs of data with Gbs of free space will take days, plus the repartitioning. It'd probably be easier to start with a 1Tb drive or something. Is this currently my best bet as conversion is not as good as I thought? I believe my other 2 partitions also come from conversion, though I may have rebuilt them later from scratch. Thank you! John -- 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
