Benefit of a subvolume below the top level btrfs subvolume? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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According to the archwiki article on a swapfile on btrfs: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Swap_file

Tip: Consider creating the subvolume directly below the top-level subvolume, e.g. @swap. Then, make sure the subvolume is mounted to /swap (or any other accessible location).

But... why? I've been researching for a bit now, and I still don't understand the benefit of a subvolume directly below the top level subvolume, as opposed to a nested subvolume.

At first I thought this might be because nested subvolumes are included in snapshots, but that doesn't seem to be the case, according to a reddit post... but I can't find anything about this on the arch wiki, gentoo wiki, or the btrfs readthedocs page.

Any ideas? I feel like the tip wouldn't just be there just because.

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[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I personally prefer top level subvolumes (@, @home, @var-log, @var-cache), because it makes it easier to know which system folders are subvolumes and back them up accordingly. They are then mounted at their respective location under /.

E.g.. I do snapshots looking at the btrfs filesystem and its top level subvolumes. I'm not doing snapshots going from the mounted root filesystem. I.e. I'd do a snapshot of @home, not a snapshot of /home.

If you want to use backup/snapshot automation tooling, I'd recommend looking at how they expect the subvolumes to be set up. E.g. snapper and timeshift expect a specific layout (which can stil be done manually after OS installation, but why bother).

this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024

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