September 10, 201411 yr as the topic says, what would be the best way to convert all my disks to btrfs???
September 10, 201411 yr as the topic says, what would be the best way to convert all my disks to btrfs??? What does best mean? Fastest? Safest? Least extra room needed? There are a bunch of ways to do it, all involve cleaning off the target drive, changing the format, and putting the files back on.
September 10, 201411 yr Move data from drive A to drive B. Format drive A. Return data from drive B to drive A.
September 10, 201411 yr I might add to truly have the safest method. You should make sure that all your data that you cannot live without is backed up onto external hard drives or similar before you start doing anything. Then if one hard drive decides to die while you are in the middle of all this your covered.
September 10, 201411 yr Community Expert Move data from drive A to drive B. Format drive A. Return data from drive B to drive A. This is probably the only way to do it and maintain parity. However, wait for beta9 before copying anything to a ReiserFS drive.
September 10, 201411 yr However, wait for beta9 before copying anything to a ReiserFS drive. Which can not be emphasized enough. Do NOT do this on Beta8.
September 10, 201411 yr However, wait for beta9 before copying anything to a ReiserFS drive. Which can not be emphasized enough. Do NOT do this on Beta8. To be pedantic, do not do this on Beta 7 or Beta 8.
September 10, 201411 yr Author no problem will wait for beta9, one other question, once I move all the data off the drive, how would I format the drive? will it give me an option like it was a new drive?
September 10, 201411 yr no problem will wait for beta9, one other question, once I move all the data off the drive, how would I format the drive? will it give me an option like it was a new drive? Stop the array, change the format on the disk, then restart the array. You will then see a 'Format disks' on the home web page. FYI, when changing to BTRFS you will see that it uses quite a bit of disk space even on an empty file system. I don't know how much of that overhead translates to actual lost disk space but the amount of space used on an empty file system can be jarring. I don't know if XFS consumes less space but if you're worried about it, try out both XFS and BTRFS. I stuck with BTRFS.
September 10, 201411 yr Community Expert However, wait for beta9 before copying anything to a ReiserFS drive. Which can not be emphasized enough. Do NOT do this on Beta8. To be pedantic, do not do this on Beta 7 or Beta 8. And only copy from disk to disk, don't use user shares for this kind of copying.
September 10, 201411 yr And only copy from disk to disk, don't use user shares for this kind of copying. And I'd recommend using rsync as well. It will do a bit of data verification but I don't know if it would recognize issues with the file system.
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