What are Btrfs subvolumes in Linux? Understand how they work and why they are better than traditional partitions with features like snapshots and flexibility.
Ignoring /boot, what is the benefit of putting everything else in different subvolumes? As opposed to just one subvolume for / and one for /home, which is what I currently have. It just looks to me like it’d be extra work, but I’m probably missing something
You can snapshot them independently. E.g. I snapshot / on every update and boot, /home every boot, and temporary file directories such as /tmp & /var/tmp don’t get snapshot at all and are also mounted with nodev,nosuid,noexec flags.
For one thing if you’re snapshotting your subvolumes for backup purposes then it will ignore nested subvolumes. Eg you dont want to preserve snapshots of huge installed game directories, cache directories, logs or docker / podman images, usually. Saves a lot of space.
Also you can tune copy on write on a subvolume, which is great for some use cases for performance.
Ignoring
/boot, what is the benefit of putting everything else in different subvolumes? As opposed to just one subvolume for/and one for/home, which is what I currently have. It just looks to me like it’d be extra work, but I’m probably missing somethingYou can snapshot them independently. E.g. I snapshot
/on every update and boot,/homeevery boot, and temporary file directories such as/tmp&/var/tmpdon’t get snapshot at all and are also mounted withnodev,nosuid,noexecflags.For one thing if you’re snapshotting your subvolumes for backup purposes then it will ignore nested subvolumes. Eg you dont want to preserve snapshots of huge installed game directories, cache directories, logs or docker / podman images, usually. Saves a lot of space.
Also you can tune copy on write on a subvolume, which is great for some use cases for performance.