I've been using btrfs since 2012, and while as of 2014, it's far from done, it's gone a long way in that time. I thought I'd post some tips and scripts from things I've learned through my own use and sharing with others, hence this page.
More generally, you'll find Btrfs documentation on the btrfs wiki.
This all started with my trying Btrfs after Avi Miller's talk at Linux.conf.au.
I started asking some questions on the mailing list, and since the wiki wasn't up to date on them, I ddi the obvious thing to start updating the Main Btrfs Wiki here and there.
After I had learned a fair amount about Btrfs already I felt others would benefit from a introduction to it, as well as best practises and what features it offers that would make you want to switch, I ended up submitting a talk to Linuxcon.
In the process of writing the talk, I learned even more about Btrfs, and wrote some of them on my Btrfs blog while linking or putting the other relevant ones on the Main Btrfs Wiki.
The fancy talk description is here:
The presentation will give you everything you know to get up to speed with btfrs, why you should want to trust your data to btrfs, how it offers a lot of what ZFS offers without the licensing problems, as well as best practices for using it.
I will go into:
the basics of administration of a btrfs filesystem
How btrfs, swraid, dmcrypt, and lvm fit or don't fit together
how to work with a single storage pool and create all your partitions from it without having to ever resize them, or require LVM as a slow and somewhat unreliable block layer.
how to have virtually as many snapshots as you want and why you really want this
how to do very efficient block level backups of changes only and much faster than rsync ever will
how those block backups can be used to deploy OS upgrades at the file level like I explained in my talk on how Google maintains its many servers last year.
The video:
The quality isn't great due to poor lighting, sorry about this, but you get the talk slides here or view them inline below.
For easier to click on links, you may prefer the pdf version or the libreoffice version.
>
To click on URLs in the presentation, click on 'with contents' in the upper left, and use those links (open to a new tab)
