On Tue, 2020-11-03 at 00:13 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Mon, Nov 2, 2020 at 5:45 AM Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd normally upgrade, but my /dev/sda uses LVM to handle root, /home
> etc. and from what I read this cannot be converted directly to BTRFS,
> which I'm interested in using.
ext4 can be converted to Btrfs but I can't strongly recommend it
because you're not going to get the same layout as a default
installation. The conversion won't remove LVM, and it won't add the
subvolume layout we're using where "home" and "root" subvolumes
are
assigned to /home and / mountpoints respectively.
OK.
> What would be the best way to approach this?:
>
> 1) Do a system upgrade and then convert to BTRFS by backing everything
> up and restoring it (I'd need guidance on how to do this).
>
> 2) Do a complete system install and then restore from backups.
>
> I'm guessing that (2) is the simplest answer, but I'd appreciate any
> comments, especially from people who have actually done either of
> these.
Top choice:
Backup /home. Optionally /etc. And hand it over to the installer for
complete wipe and clean install. From scratch setup. And after going
through initial setup, restore /home (specifically restore the
contents of ~/ for each user). Probably the most straightforward.
Yes, that looks like what I'll go for.
Second choice:
Esoteric but a rather neat trick, is btrfs conversion, snapshot root
and home. And use Btrfs send/receive to populate a new Btrfs file
system with those snapshots. The conversion to Btrfs is merely a means
to being able to use send/receive to replicate them. You get to keep
your customizations without a clean install, but you do get the
subvolume layout of a clean install. It is a bit partition-ninja. And
there are post steps like all the bootloader stuff. It really depends
on how comfortable you are with a rather low level process of
migrating the data, almost inevitably messing it up, and working
through the screwups. I've done quite a few of these and manage to
screw it up somehow, and have to backtrack but I also don't panic
easily, not least of which is a bunch of backups. So no matter how
badly I mess it up I know I'm not losing things I care about.
Here be dragons :-) No thanks, I had enough trouble getting my head
around LVM (one reason I'm keen to move to BTRFS).
poc