BTRFS subvolume management and drive distribution

[Gulala]

As the title suggests, I have setup my array with BTRFS on all my drives. I have 2 (I hope) basic questions:

1) Can I create shares in the unraid GUI and still be able to take snapshots of these subvolumes? (I assume a share in unraid becomes equivalent to a subvolume) When I've tested how unraid creates shares in btrfs I've not been able to locate the subvolumes manually anywhere on the disks, which would make snapshotting impossible? How can unraid create a share on the array if unraid doesn't create a subvolume for that share?

2) Assume I have a subvolume correctly set up on one of my drives in the array. If that drive gets full, can btrfs deal with it and continue the subvolume on another drive? Will snapshots stop working if that happens?

 

Also, if there exists some kind of unraid plugin for managing btrfs better than the unraid gui it would be greatly appreciated if I could get a link to that ^^

[JorgeB]

9 hours ago, Gulala said:

1) Can I create shares in the unraid GUI and still be able to take snapshots of these subvolumes?

No, for now you can only do it manually:

btrfs sub create /mnt/diskX/share_name

A subvolume will then become a share and can be configured using the GUI.

 

9 hours ago, Gulala said:

2) Assume I have a subvolume correctly set up on one of my drives in the array. If that drive gets full, can btrfs deal with it and continue the subvolume on another drive? Will snapshots stop working if that happens?

With Unraid each disk is a separate filesystem, subvolumes and snapshots can never spam more than one array disk, same for any individual files, you can have subvolumes with the same name in multiple disks, working as the same share, but snapshots then need to be made disk by disk, that's how I do it.

 

9 hours ago, Gulala said:

Also, if there exists some kind of unraid plugin for managing btrfs better than the unraid gui it would be greatly appreciated if I could get a link to that ^^

For now you can only do it on the console or with a script, there's no GUI support or plugin for that.