Is it new kids to Linux or Arch users or what is it that pushes people to such complicated BTRFS setups???

[oshunluvr]

I've be amazed at how many people have these vastly complicated intertwined BTRFS setups - I swear I saw one user laying out the 12 separate subvolumes they used for everything under the sun - like a separate subvolume for the /root folder. What the heck for A 31MB subvolume? Just to save 31MB from the root subvolume backup?

One arch user has snapshots inside a nested hidden folder inside the primary subvolume and couldn't figure out how to rollback after a bad update. What until he wants to delete the primary subvolume after a rollback. That will be fun.

Is it just a lack of critical thinking skills or common sense?

I've been on Reddit too much lately.

My setup is so simple it's become boring. Maybe I need to complicate it so things are more challenging, lol

[Snowhog]

My setup is so simple it's become boring. Maybe I need to complicate it so things are more challenging, lol

You need to get your setup to the point that you tell your self: "It's unbreakable!" Then put your self to the task of actually breaking it!

[oshunluvr]

LOL, sounds just like me. I'm mean, hey I'm finally retired - what else do I have to do?

Uh, don't tell my wife I said that!

[claydoh]

Is this no different from installing 7 or 8 operating systems on MBR systems back in the day?
"Because you can" is usually enough
Add to that all the ricers who want very specific, arcane, and pixel-perfect desktop customization, with weird shortcuts and 4 different monitors on 3 GPUs

[oshunluvr]

Is this no different from installing 7 or 8 operating systems on MBR systems back in the day?
"Because you can" is usually enough
Add to that all the ricers who want very specific, arcane, and pixel-perfect desktop customization, with weird shortcuts and 4 different monitors on 3 GPUs

Yeah right, lol.

I think the most complicated setup I had back in the day had /, /var, /usr, and /tmp all on different drives and different IDE channels for disk performance.
Then I upgraded to 4x500GB drives (SATA) and used a partition on each drive with mdadm for the same reason. At this point BTRFS didn't have the performance I wanted.

Now-a-days with NVME drives I don't bother with all those performance tweaks other than fstab options. I just BTRFS and call it a day.

I was wondering the other day about a 4-partition (I have 4 nvme drives) RAID just to see how fast it would be, but I quickly surmised I probably wouldn't notice a difference in daily use. The only thing I want to happen faster is Handbrake and that's not a storage issue.

[jlittle]

- like a separate subvolume for the /root folder. What the heck for A 31MB subvolume? Just to save 31MB from the root subvolume backup?

A frequently changing 31 MB saved from incremental backups can add up, if one wants to keep snapshots going back months or years, as I do. /root on my desktop would be not much use, but for someone who uses the root account a lot there might be more because the root user gets its own caches. A better idea than a separate subvolume for /root might be making /root/.cache a link to a cache subvolume, which doesn't get backed up.

My intuition is that one should be in touch with data one cares about, and consider the backups one wants to have. I can imagine that might result in quite a few subvolumes, but I doubt if that would ever line up with /var, /usr, and so on. /var gets a lot of large stuff dumped in it by default, like databases and docker images; rather than a separate subvolume for /var I'd be seeing what's there and perhaps finding better places. For example, I've got a few postgresql databases that I've moved into /home.

[oshunluvr]

A frequently changing 31 MB saved from incremental backups can add up, if one wants to keep snapshots going back months or years, as I do. /root on my desktop would be not much use, but for someone who uses the root account a lot there might be more because the root user gets its own caches. A better idea than a separate subvolume for /root might be making /root/.cache a link to a cache subvolume, which doesn't get backed up.

Sorry, but I strongly disagree. The /root folder - at least as far as *buntus is concerned - is rarely, if ever touched. You actually log into root and use a desktop as root user? That sounds unusual from my perspective, but if that were the case maybe. Still, incremental backups don't "add up" IMO. It's literally the opposite. Incremental backups are, by design, a minimal transfer of bytes. If one keeps years worth of backups I seriously doubt having /root on a separate subvolume is much help. But that's my perspective.

[Bings]

Open Suse has more separation than Kubuntu by because they want to exclude certain things from snapshots:

3.1.3 Directories that are excluded from snapshots #

Some directories need to be excluded from snapshots for different reasons. The following list shows all directories that are excluded:

/boot/grub2/i386-pc, /boot/grub2/x86_64-efi, /boot/grub2/powerpc-ieee1275, /boot/grub2/s390x-emu A rollback of the boot loader configuration is not supported. The directories listed above are architecture-specific. The first two directories are present on AMD64/Intel 64 machines, the latter two on IBM POWER and on IBM Z, respectively.

/home If /home does not reside on a separate partition, it is excluded to avoid data loss on rollbacks.

/opt Third-party products usually get installed to /opt. It is excluded to avoid uninstalling these applications on rollbacks.

/srv Contains data for Web and FTP servers. It is excluded to avoid data loss on rollbacks.

/tmp All directories containing temporary files and caches are excluded from snapshots.

/usr/local This directory is used when manually installing software. It is excluded to avoid uninstalling these installations on rollbacks.

/var This directory contains many variable files, including logs, temporary caches, third party products in /var/opt, and is the default location for virtual machine images and databases. Therefore this subvolume is created to exclude all of this variable data from snapshots and has Copy-On-Write disabled.

On Kubuntu, I used a script (I posted it here somewhere) where I incrementally backed everything up to a separate drive. I didn't however have any regular snapshot setup where I could roll back in case of a bad update or whatever. I can do quick roll back with Open Suse because it does regular snapshots out the box which you can select in the Grub menu. My full backup script doesn't work and I haven't found out how to do it, so I do a rsync backup of my home folder onto another drive to backup data.