Arch Linux

Section8

Member

Registered: 2023-05-12

Posts: 21

EXT4 to BTRFS question

I am in the process of converting my home desktop system from EXT4+LVM to btrfs and still trying to wrap my head around btrfs.

Under EXT4, I had my big media files (digital picture collection, etc) in a separate filesystem mounted as /mnt/data.  I bind mounted the appropriate /home directories to /mnt/data.  So /home/user/pictures  bind mounts to /mnt/data/pictures, and so on.

In my dim understanding of btrfs, it seems like a subvolume is a "fancy" sub-directory, and mounting a subvolume is kind of like a more sophisticated bind mount.  With this in mind, maybe it would be a good idea to organize /mnt/data so that each media directory is a subvolume, and mount the subvolumes to /home, instead of doing bind mounts.

Would there be any point to this, or am I over thinking things?

EdeWolf

Member

Registered: 2016-01-06

Posts: 85

Re: EXT4 to BTRFS question

Well, if you mount a subvolume, you only see it once, while with a bind mount, you have the same mount twice. Just in case, that is important for some reason. If not, the way I understand your post, there is nothing wrong with your approach. For this case it would be sufficient to convert /mnt/data to btrfs.