Hi, I want to do an “awesome things” list with BTRFS tools

Help me gather them?

Update: see here

General

BTRFS CLI Interface

btrfs-progs

official userpace utilities

BTRFS Assistant

Tool for doing many BTRFS actions graphically

It requires snapper and offers a GUI for it.

butter-manager

Tool for managing snapshots, balancing filesystems and upgrading the system safetly.

Backups & Snapshots

btrbk

Backup utility using BTRFS

Snapper

General system snapshot utility with BTRFS support, used in OpenSUSE Tumbleweed by default. There are also plugins for Fedoras dnf and for Arch pacman.

Timeshift

System restore tool for Linux. Creates filesystem snapshots using rsync+hardlinks, or BTRFS snapshots. Supports scheduled snapshots, multiple backup levels, and exclude filters. Snapshots can be restored while system is running or from Live CD/USB.

Currently maintained by LinuxMint, even though they dont use BTRFS by default, it works better there.

libtuikit / transactional-update

Used in OpenSUSE microOS and the Desktop variants.

provides an application and library to update a Linux operating system in a transactional way, i.e. the update will be performed in the background while the system continues running as it is. Only if the update was the successful as a whole the system will boot into the new snapshot.

Available as a library for other distros.

Yet Another BTRFS Snapshotter

Alternatives don’t supports customized of snapshot location, (e.g. Arch recommended layout). Adhering to such layouts, and rolling back using them, sometime involve non-obvious workarounds. The motivation for yabsnap was to create a simpler, hackable and customizable snapshot system.

btrfs-autosnap

There are 2 separate projects with that name

grub-btrfs

Set BTRFS snapshots as boot options

[btrfs-sxbackup])https://github.com/masc3d/btrfs-sxbackup)

Incremental btrfs snapshot backups with push/pull support via SSH

Small CLI tools

btrfsd - tiny Btrfs maintenance daemon

Btrfsd is a lightweight daemon that takes care of all Btrfs filesystems on a Linux system.

It can:

  • Check for detected errors and broadcast a warning if any were found, or optionally send an email
  • Perform scrub periodically if the system is not on battery
  • Optionally schedule balancing operations as well

dupreremove

Tools for deduplicating file systems

compsize

Takes a list of files on a btrfs filesystem and measures used compression types and effective compression ratio

Used in flatpak-dedup-checker

btdu

sampling disk usage profiler for btrfs For multiple reasons, classic disk usage analyzers such as ncdu cannot provide an accurate depiction of actual disk usage. (btrfs compression in particular is challenging to classic analyzers, and special tools must be used to query compressed usage.)

btrfs-list

Helps listing directories

btrfs-fuse

A read-only btrfs implementation using FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace). Although btrfs is already in mainline Linux kernel, there are still use-cases for such read-only btrfs implementation:

btrfs debugger

The btrfs debugger (pronounced “buttered”).

btrd is a REPL debugger that helps inspect mounted btrfs filesystems. btrd is particularly useful in exploring on-disk structures and has full knowledge of all on-disk types.

ntfs2btrfs

a tool which does in-place conversion of Microsoft’s NTFS filesystem to the open-source filesystem Btrfs, much as btrfs-convert does for ext2. The original image is saved as a reflink copy at image/ntfs.img, and if you want to keep the conversion you can delete this to free up space.

Consists of a Windows and a Linux executable. Does not work on the primary drive.

WinBTRFS

filesystem driver for Windows

Partition managers with support

  • KDE-Partitionamanger
  • GNOME-Disks
  • blivet-gui (Fedora Anaconda setup)
  • gparted ?

Data recovery

When having deleted or corrupted data on a BTRFS partition, these tools can help:

Testdisk?

  • photorec?

Scalpel?

R-Linux

Freeware, not FOSS? Not related to R and “R-Studio” is also not related to RStudio

BTRFS bindings

These allow you to do BTRFS actions in many programming languages

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        4·
        5 months ago

        Timeshifts main reason to use is BTRFS functionality. It’s a fantastic tool, but I only used it previously on EXT4, in which case it defaults to slow rsync method. I really like the software, but on my new install decided against using it (I’m on EXT4 yet again). https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift And while I post this reply, just noticed that Linux Mint is maintaining it now. The old repo is in archive mode: https://github.com/teejee2008/timeshift

        • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
          2·
          5 months ago

          Really interesting project.

          Yes I also thought it would be focused on non-BTRFS, especially as Mint doesnt use BTRFS either, right?

          • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
            3·
            5 months ago

            You mean the default filesystem? I actually never used Mint and don’t think it’s the default, but most likely an option at install time. Maybe they plan on switching as the default in the future.

          • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
            3·
            5 months ago

            I never used BTRFS at all. At the moment I do not feel comfortable using BTRFS yet and wait until its proven over long time and ironed out even the weirdest edge cases.

            Edit: Don’t misunderstand me. I know its relative stable now, but reading here and there about the problems makes me very uncomfortable to switch from the battle tested EXT4. I really like its features and evaluated last year to use BTRFS as my system drive. Ultimately decided against it for now. I plan on using it, and clicked this post for this reason, to learn more about it.

            • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
              2·
              5 months ago

              Maintaining btrfs is more work than maintaining ext4, which basically doesn’t need any. I.e. running btrfs scrub is important to keep performance up. Monthly scrubs are good because they don’t take as long if done regularly.

              Btrfs balance can free up some space, but otherwise isn’t important on SSDs.

              • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
                1·
                5 months ago

                I think BTRFS is especially problematic on Fedora Atomic desktops.

                Afaik the OSTree snapshots use BTRFS deduplication, also the zstd compression helps reduce storage usage and increase SSD use.

                But as the entire system partitions are read only, you cant balance, scrub etc them.

                This is a big issue I think, I will open a Fedora Discussion post about this.

                https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/119216

                • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
                  2·
                  5 months ago

                  Afaik the OSTree snapshots use BTRFS deduplication […]

                  Note: OSTree will transparently take advantage of some BTRFS features if deployed on it. [1]

                  Interesting, I didn’t know OSTree takes advantage of BTRFS features.

                  On my current system I use ext4 instead of btrfs which I regret specifically because of the missing transparent compression and reflink copy.

                  [1] https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/introduction/

                  • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
                    1·
                    5 months ago

                    I also tried an install with LVM and F2FS instead of the default EXT4. It works, and F2FS is faster in theory, but I only found 2 bigger benchmarks. The older one said BTRFS is waaay slower, a newer one with exact reproducability details said it is equal.

                    And yes I suppose that rpm-ostree utilizes the BTRFS CoW, deduplication and compression which all help reducing disk usage.

                    But I dont know that.